**6. Results**

158 Haptics Rendering and Applications

The haptic device system, consisting of the haptic device and rehabilitation software, was designed for functional and cognitive rehabilitation. The system was tested in experiments

Twenty-seven subjects from the same kindergarten initially participated in this experiment. The age of the subjects ranged from 4 years 7 months to 6 years 3 months, and the average was 5 years 5 months. All subjects were right handed and one subject wore glasses. Of these 27 subjects, the experimental data of only 20 subjects (8 males and 12 females) were used, as

Informed consent was obtained from all parents of the test subjects and from the kindergarten staff. The experiment was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of

The experiment was carried out in the playroom of the kindergarten that the children attended. Test subjects were positioned in a chair (seat height: 290 mm, back height: 510 mm) in front of a desk (height: 470 mm, width: 1200 mm, length: 750 mm) that they regularly used.

The test subjects were asked to play the evaluation program. The goal of this program, called "Starfish", was to move the starfish from the right end to the left end of the display along the thick blue curve with a red centerline as quickly and precisely as they could. This program is a variation of the "Wave" program mentioned in the previous section. The display image is shown in Fig. 10. The experimenter asked the subject to bring the starfish back home quickly because a big fish is after it. Also, the user pays attention to sea urchins along the edge of the thick curve. The sea urchins can prick the starfish with their needles. In the experiment, the subjects tried three different haptic force settings. One is viscosity force, which is related to the velocity of the grip motion. The other one is assistance force, which

The haptic device and the display were placed on the desk, as shown in Fig. 9.

Fig. 8. "Wave" program for evaluation

to apply and evaluate the haptic system as therapy.

**5. Materials and methods** 

Tokyo Metropolitan University.

**5.2 Tasks and protocols** 

**5.1 Subjects** 

explained below.
