di Francesco Unali
What if two musicians playing together could do more than just see and hear each other? What if they could also physically sense each other's movements? After five years of study, with funding of approximately 5 million euros from the European Union, an international group of researchers coordinated byUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma together with Sant'Anna High School of Pisa, its spin-off company IUVO srl, the CNR, the University of Newcastle (UK) and the University of Ghent (Belgium), has published the results of the European project CONBOTS (“CONnected through roBOTS”).
The project, coordinated by Professor Domenico Formica of the Faculty of Engineering UCBM, has demonstrated how the body can receive and transmit movement-related information through physical contact, and does so even more effectively than previously thought. For example, when two people perform a collaborative task, such as a violin duet, they rely primarily on sight and hearing for coordination and cannot rely on physical contact. Yet, physical contact is essential in social interactions between individuals: just think of a violin teacher who, when teaching a student a movement, doesn't simply demonstrate it by performing it, but grasps the student's arm and guides him or her through the correct movement.
The CONBOTS project worked precisely on these aspects of learning, demonstrating that haptic feedback – the sense of touch and physical forces – can improve coordination in precise motor gesturesTo replicate physical contact between the two violinists in a scenario where it is typically absent, researchers from the CONBOTS team developed a pair of wearable upper-limb exoskeletons capable of sensing the movements of the two violinists and, when they do not coincide, applying forces proportional to the difference between their movements. In this way, the exoskeletons allow the two musicians to virtually connect, allowing them to physically sense the movement of their partner.
The researchers recruited twenty pairs of violinists, ten amateurs and ten professionals, who performed a piece of music while wearing exoskeletons under four sensory conditions: hearing only; hearing and sight; hearing and haptics; and hearing, sight, and haptics. In the presence of haptic feedback, their coordination improved significantly, with the musicians aligning their arm movements more precisely, better synchronizing their bow positions, and achieving better musical coordination.
The results of the CONBOTS project, published on Science robotics, suggest that haptic feedback may represent an effective communication channel in collaborative tasks between individuals due to its implicit nature. Beyond music, this approach could have a broader impact on numerous collaborative activities, including motor learning, for example.
