Preserving Agency During Electrical Muscle Stimulation Training Speeds up Reaction Time Directly After Removing EMS
Shunichi Kasahara (Sony CSL), Kazuma Takada (Sony CSL), Jun Nishida (UChicago), Kazuhisa Shibata (RIKEN CBS) , Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech) , Pedro Lopes (UChicago).
Collaborative projects with UChicago Human Computer Integration Lab (Pedro Lopes, Jun Nishida) , Kazuhisa Shibata (RIKEN CBS) and Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech)
This paper will be presented in ACM CHI’21 (full paper)
Abstract
Abstract: Force feedback devices, such as motor-based exoskeletons or wearables based on electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), have the unique potential to accelerate users’ own reaction time (RT). However, this speedup has only been explored while the de- vice is attached to the user. In fact, very little is known regarding whether this faster reaction time still occurs after the user removes the device from their bodies–this is precisely what we investigated by means of a simple reaction time (RT) experiment, in which participants were asked to tap as soon as they saw an LED flashing. Participants experienced this in three EMS conditions: (1) fast-EMS, the electrical impulses were synced with the LED; (2) agency-EMS, the electrical impulse was delivered 40ms faster than the participant’s own RT, which prior work has shown to preserve one’s sense of agency over this movement; and, (3) late-EMS: the impulse was delivered after the participant’s own RT. Our results revealed that the participants’ RT was significantly reduced by approximately 8ms (up to 20ms) only after training with the agency-EMS condition. This finding suggests that the prioritizing agency during EMS training is key to motor-adaptation, i.e., it enables a faster motor response even after the user has removed the EMS device from their body.
Talk / Presentation
Paper
Shunichi Kasahara, Kazuma Takada, Jun Nishida, Kazuhisa Shibata, Shinsuke Shimojo and Pedro Lopes . 2020, Preserving Agency During Electrical Muscle Stimulation Training Speeds up Reaction Time Directly After Removing EMS. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445147
Source code : https://github.com/shks/EMSSpeedUp
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