For my part of the lit review, I found this project called Possessed Hand, which came out of the University of Tokyo in 2010. The project used an arm strap, worn around the foreman, which contained 24 electrodes for stimulating the muscles of the hand and wrist. The goal of the project was to control fine movements of the hand, so as to eventually play the koto, a Japanese instrument, remotely. Their research gave an answer to my initial question when starting out with this idea, and that was whether fine control is feasible for controlling the hand to do meaningful movements. They found that, through electrical stimulation, the hand was not able to move accurately, nor with enough force to play the koto, or even lift an object. After failed experiments in these areas, they concluded that their device could be used to help teach people how to play the koto, by giving them stimuli as feedback for when/how to play, instead of simply playing FOR them. This leads me to think that our project for this class should need to lean away from fine movements, and more towards interesting applications. Perhaps the small muscles of the hand are out of the question, while the body’s larger muscles may be too big to get their corresponding limbs moving. Also, relating back to my first blog post in this class, I would be interested in stimulated these muscles for the goal of impacting some external object. But of course, this impact would have to be less refined than a koto, while still interesting.
Their research also revealed a bit of the user experience when being stimulated by such a device. They recorded comments by testers, saying that they felt ‘hacked’, they wanted to be controlled remotely, or it was ‘scary…just scary’. I feel this is a fascinating aspect of controlling movement with EMS, as the concept of controlling another person’s body is a sensation that few, if any of us, have had, and also in reverse, being controlled.
Another source I found for starting to think about applications was this project by the artist Choy Ka Fai. He used audio signals, generated from Max/MSP, to serve as the pulse-source for his muscle stimulators. His goal was to stimulate muscles so as to mimic the movements of a deceased dancer. He has videos and images documenting his progress, and he seems to have come across the same limitations as the Possessed Hand folks, in that he wasn’t able to achieve a level of control he seemed to be happy with, and so instead used the stimulation as a sort of haptic feedback for learning muscle movements and performance.
Fai ended up applying his electrodes to a group of dances, allowing them to feel the pulses, and essentially dance like this deceased dancer. This is something I find very interesting, using the stimuli to control a group of people in the same way. The video we watched in class of the faces all synchronized is similar to this, but they were recorded at different times. Perhaps it would be interesting to have a group of people all controlled, so they they could be ‘played’ by a traditional input device, or even a myo-electric input device we make :).