**1. Introduction**

164 Haptics Rendering and Applications

direction of the cursor by moving his or her upper limb to the appropriate position. Usually, this ability is obtained by visuomotor experience beginning at birth. Moreover, improved and refined actions increase with the increase of experiences. In many cases, developmental disorder children lack many skills. They have a problem with hand-eye coordination due to their learning difficulties and lack of sensory-motor experiences. From the viewpoint of occupational therapists, upper-limb motion depends on stability and control of the trunk and shoulder. Therefore, they focus on improving posture, stability, and shoulder control before using therapeutic tools. During operation of the haptic device system, the users held their trunk in median antigravity. The upper limb was held in the air, and the fingers were used to hold the grip. Shoulder and elbow joint motion were involved with the motion of the grip. Especially, moving one's hand on a smooth curving trajectory, as in the experimental programs, requires coordination of multiple functions, direction control by the shoulder joint, and position adjustment of the elbow joint. Thus, the haptic device system, which uses upper-limb motion with visuomotor involvement, can be effective for hand-eye

We developed a rehabilitation system using a haptic device that integrates both motion and sensory therapy. The system is designed to maintain the user's interest during a rehabilitation activity and also to provide a quantitative evaluation for occupational therapists. From the results of experiments with kindergarten children, a negative correlation of duration time and motion error was confirmed in the two different cases of applied force and no force applied. In addition, the motion error decreased according to age. It was found that this developed system

I would like to acknowledge the generous support received from Dr. Takagi and the students of the Tokyo Metropolitan University and Shibaura Institute of Technology who

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effectively motivated and evaluated hand-eye coordination.

assisted in the experiments conducted during this research.

coordination training.

**9. Acknowledgment** 

**10. References** 

**8. Conclusions** 

The human spine is an important structure, providing strength and support as well as permitting the body to bend, stretch, rotate and lean. It is also a vulnerable part of our skeleton open to disease and injuries like whiplash, low back pain, scoliosis etc. Whiplash is a frequent consequence of rear-end automobile accidents and has been a significant public health problem for many years with injury to one or more ligaments, intervertebral discs, facet joints or muscles of the neck. Low back pain is a very common disease and strongly associated with degeneration of intervertebral discs (Luoma et al., 2000) seen in people with sedentary jobs spending hours sitting in relatively fixed positions, with the lower back forced away from its natural lordotic curvature. This causes health risks of the lumbar spine, especially for the three lower vertebrae L3-L5. 80% of people in the United States will have lower back pain at some point in their life (Vallfors, 1985). Scoliosis is a less common but more complicated spinal disorder, being a congenital 3D deformity of the spine and trunk affecting 1.5-3% of the population. In severe cases, surgical correction is required to stabilize the scoliosis curvature. Studies into the treatment of these spinal diseases have played an important role in modern medicine. Many biomechanical models have been proposed to study dynamic behavior and biomechanics of the human spine, to develop new implants and new surgical strategies for treating these spinal diseases.
