SpinalLog: visuo-haptic feedback in musculoskeletal manipulation training

Current techniques for teaching spinal mobilisation follow the traditional classroom approach: an instructor demonstrates a technique and students attempt to emulate it by practising on each other while receiving feedback from the instructor. This paper introduces SpinalLog, a novel tangible user interface (TUI) for teaching and learning spinal mobilisation. The system was co-designed with physiotherapy experts to look and feel like a human spine, supporting the learning of mobilisation techniques through real-time visual feedback and deformation based passive haptic feedback. We evaluated Physical Fidelity, Visual Feedback, and Passive Haptic Feedback in an experiment to understand their effects on physiotherapy students' ability to replicate a mobilisation pattern recorded by an expert. We found that simultaneous feedback has the largest effect, followed by passive haptic feedback. The high fidelity of the interface has little effect, but it plays an important role in the perception of the system's benefit.