WYFIWIF: A haptic communication paradigm for collaborative motor skills learning

Motor skills transfer is a challenging issue for many applications such as surgery, design and industry. In order to design virtual environments that support motor skills learning, a deep understanding of humans ’ haptic interactions is required. To ensure skills transfer, experts and novices need to collaborate. This requires the construction of the common frame of reference between the teacher and the learner in order to understand each other. In this paper, human-human haptic collaboration is investigated in order to understand how haptic information is exchanged. Furthermore, WYFIWIF (What You Feel Is What I Feel), a haptic communication paradigm is introduced. This paradigm is based on a hand guidance metaphor. The paradigm helps operators to construct an efficient common frame of reference by allowing a direct haptic communication. A learning virtual environment is used to evaluate this haptic communication paradigm. Hence, 60 volunteer students performed a needle insertion learning task. The results of this experiment show that, compared to conventional methods, the learning method based on haptic communication improves the novices ’ performance in such a task. We conclude that the WYFIWIF paradigm facilitate expert-novice haptic collaboration to teach motor skills