You practice a brand new song on the piano. One part stumbles you. No matter how over and over you are attempting, your fingers just don’t move quickly enough. Then you set on a special device that appears like a robotic hand. His engine moves his fingers faster than you may move them yourself. When you sit at the piano without hand, your fingers can now jump on high equipment. You play a quick part that seemed unimaginable before.
In a recent series of experiments, dozens of skilled piano players had accurate experience. They Improved his piano skills with a worn -worn hand handAlso called exoskeleton. Shinichi Furuya and his team divided the results on January 15.
“Many people use this type of rehabilitation or games in virtual reality,” says Furuya. “I thought it may also be good for music education.” Furuya is a researcher at the Neuropiano Institute at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. in Tokyo, Japan.
Nicholas Hatsopoulos Studies Sensory Motor Control at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Neurobiologist, he didn’t take part in a brand new study. But he really liked it. “I thought it was super cool,” he says.
A brand new way of exercise
Furuya was an expert musician. “I practiced [piano]like 10 hours a day – he says. He practiced so much that he developed a motor disorder in his hands. That is why he says: “I modified my profession from a pianist to a scientist.”
His hands are doing higher now. And still plays and teaches piano. But a number of years ago he also began to imagine a brand new way to practice musicians. “I thought that maybe we needed a robot that can teach how to move your fingers,” he says.
Furuya isn’t an engineer. So he told certainly one of his colleagues about his idea. He wondered if it might be possible to construct such a robot. And he was told: “Yes, why not?”
The robot they built suits one hand. To test the device, Furuya and his colleagues brought skilled pianists to the laboratory. The variety of patients was “very impressive”, says Hatsopoulos.
In one experiment, 60 pianists practiced the same complex pattern. This includes pressing the indicator and the ring finger, then the middle finger and Pinky together. You switch as soon as possible. Try it!
Even moving very slowly, it is vitally difficult. Pianists practiced until their fingers could move faster.
Then scientists divided 60 pianists into five groups. The first group wore a hand, playing this difficult pattern. He moved his fingers faster than the musicians could handle themselves. In the second group, the device slowly moved the fingers in the same difficult pattern. The third group experienced the fast finger movement, but all fingers moved concurrently. Two other groups didn’t use the hand. One of them still practiced a difficult pattern himself. The last group has just rested.
Then just one group could play a difficult pattern faster than before. They were pianists who used a robotic hand to quickly exercise complex finger movements. The time between their keys accelerated by a mean of about 6 percent.
Pianists often said Furuyi that their fingers felt “very light” after using the robot. In addition, they only used the device on the right hands. However, the speed of their left hand has also improved!
“It actually stunned me,” says Hatsopoulos.
One day after training with a robot, these pianists can still play faster than usual.
Furuya doesn’t expect, nevertheless, that the effect will last for much longer. He believes that pianists would probably have to use the device often to keep the speed bonus.
Unfortunately, they cannot do it now. “This is still a prototype,” explains Furuya, so that they cannot take home device with them yet.
Hatsopoulos believes that this robotic training has probably returned to some neural connections in the musicians’ brains. Somatosensory (yes mat-oh-seen-oe) is a brain region liable for servicing sensory feedback. This is what prompts as the fingers of the people’s robot.
When someone moves their very own fingers, one other a part of the brain – motor bark – manages this movement.
But these two parts of the brain are divided, says Hatsopoulos. He notices the left and right sides of the brain similarly, which control the opposite sides of the body. These connections might help explain why the training improved the speed of the musicians of their left hand, though they wore the device only on the right.
Therapy, sport, games and more
Doctors and researchers already use robotic devices similar to this in therapy, notes Hatsopoulos. For example, stroke often impairs movement on one side of the body. Using the robot to move the arm might help the patient regain the previous range of motion.
However, the exoskeletons that move their fingers and hands remained behind. This is because the robots are complex and “more difficult to build,” says Hatsopoulos.
The robot team that built the Furuy team can only move your fingers only a technique – down. “We are developing a more complex job,” he says. He will find a way to transfer two ponds at the same time. This will allow much more complex finger movements.
Furuya imagines that robotic training might help people master many classes except piano keys. Pro players must practice complex keyboard or joystick movements. Surgeons must learn complicated, delicate hand movements. And the baseball brooms must master the grabbing of the ball in a certain way. If a robot might help someone train any such hand movement, says Furuya, perhaps practice is not going to be so repetitive. “They can use the time of exercise for more creative actions,” he says.
