

MIT researchers have created a force feedback suit that could provide real-time feedback to every joint in your body based on a human teacher's motions.

Let's say I'm learning to throw a left jab. My fist should come straight out from my shoulder, elbow in. But, as a novice boxer, my left elbow keeps poking out. My boxing coach would record the ideal left jab (lots of pop, with more snap than thud) with motion capture tech and feed that information into the software. Then, I'd don the suit and go to chop the wood on a punching bag.

Using my poor technique, as my elbow chicken-winged out, the suit would provide vibrational force to guide my elbow in, based on the perfect form that my boxing coach recorded. And apparently, this would work:

In experiments with arm motions, the researchers found that the suit increased students’

learning rates by up to 23%, and reduced errors by up to 27%, as well as enabling students to learn movements “more deeply” by affecting their subconscious learning of motor skills.

The work by Jeff Lieberman and Cynthia Breazeal appeared in *IEEE Transactions on Robotics. *

But these suits aren't coming out as an accessory for Wii Yoga anytime soon. The researchers say that their technology is still very expensive and that the tracking/motion-capture systems for the teachers' movements are unwieldy.

“For this to be successful in the real world it has to be much less expensive, and very robust. Tracking systems are typically optical [needing a setup in the room] or exoskeleton-style [wearable] which results in high expense and high weight, respectively. "

The team is not working on fixing these problems, but plenty of researchers are.

[Thanks, Physorg.com]