An auditory display system for aiding interjoint coordination

Patients with lack of proprioception are unable to build and maintain ‘internal models’ of their limbs and monitor their limb movements because these patients do not receive the appropriate information from muscles and joints. This project was undertaken to determine if auditory signals can provide proprioceptive information normally obtained through muscle and joint receptors. Sonification of spatial location and sonification of joint motion, for monitoring arm/hand motions, was attempted in two pilot experiments with a patient. Sonification of joint motion though strong time/synchronization cues was the most successful approach. These results are encouraging and suggest that auditory feedback of joint motions may be substitute for proprioceptive input. However, additional data will have to be collected and control experiments will have to be done.

[1]  S. P. Evseev,et al.  The Control of Movement , 1996 .

[2]  E Luschei,et al.  Muscle potentials in reaction time. , 1967, Experimental neurology.

[3]  P. Lennie,et al.  Spatial frequency analysis in the visual system. , 1985, Annual review of neuroscience.

[4]  F A Mussa-Ivaldi,et al.  Adaptive representation of dynamics during learning of a motor task , 1994, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[5]  R. Jackendoff,et al.  A Generative Theory of Tonal Music , 1985 .

[6]  C. Ghez,et al.  Loss of proprioception produces deficits in interjoint coordination. , 1993, Journal of neurophysiology.

[7]  R L Sainburg,et al.  Intersegmental dynamics are controlled by sequential anticipatory, error correction, and postural mechanisms. , 1999, Journal of neurophysiology.

[8]  Robert L. Sainburg,et al.  Spatial representations and internal models of limb dynamics in motor learning , 1999 .

[9]  J. Gordon,et al.  Impairments of reaching movements in patients without proprioception. II. Effects of visual information on accuracy. , 1995, Journal of neurophysiology.

[10]  John W. Krakauer,et al.  Independent learning of internal models for kinematic and dynamic control of reaching , 1999, Nature Neuroscience.

[11]  Miller S. Puckette,et al.  Combining Event and Signal Processing in the MAX Graphical Programming Environment , 1991 .

[12]  R L Sainburg,et al.  Control of limb dynamics in normal subjects and patients without proprioception. , 1995, Journal of neurophysiology.

[13]  Barbara Tillmann,et al.  Influence of Global Structure on Musical Target Detection and Recognition , 1998 .

[14]  C Ghez,et al.  Roles of proprioceptive input in the programming of arm trajectories. , 1990, Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology.