Effect of Display Location on Finger Motor Skill Training with Music-Based Gamification

The motor control of individual fingers is an important part of daily life, but there are many people who have difficulty with it, such as elderly people and stroke patients. While continuous rehabilitation is necessary for functional recovery of finger mobility and suppression of functional deterioration, it usually requires the assistance of occupational therapists. Furthermore, the rehabilitation process can be monotonous, which makes it difficult for patients to maintain their motivation. Over a series of studies, we have developed a finger movement training system that incorporates gamification and is based on playing music using a Pressing Evaluation Training System that can measure the force exerted by each finger. One remaining problem was that patients had difficulty recognizing the fingering information, and it took some time for them to get used to locating this information quickly. In this study, we applied augmented reality (AR) technology to display each sound element as close as possible to the position of the corresponding finger so that the user could directly perceive the information for each finger while wearing the head mounted display. We conducted a user study with 10 university students to determine if the distance between the sound element display position and the location of each finger had an effect on performance. The results indicated that incorporating AR allowed the users to recognize the correct finger positions more quickly.