GeniePutt: Augmenting human motor skills through electrical muscle stimulation

Abstract

Motor skills are omnipresent in our daily lives. Humans seek to learn new skills or improve existing ones. In this work, we explore how the actuation of the human body can be used to augment motor skills. We present GeniePutt, which augments the human performance via electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). We conducted a user study in which we controlled the turning angle of the wrist through GeniePutt to increase participants’ accuracy in a mini-golf scenario. Our results indicate that the best accuracy can be achieved when human capabilities are combined with augmentation performed through EMS.