The robot hand’s exoskeleton helps professional pianists learn to play faster by moving their fingers.

Robotic exoskeletons have long been used to rehabilitate people who have lost the use of their hands due to injury or medical conditions, but their use to improve performance in able-bodied people has been less studied.

now, Shinichi Furuya and his colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo found that using a robotic exoskeleton can improve the finger speed of trained pianists after a single 30-minute training session.

“I’m a pianist, but [injured] My hands got damaged from practicing too much,” Furuya says. “I was struggling with the dilemma between over-practicing and preventing injury, so I decided I had to figure out a way to improve my skills without practicing.”

Furuya recalled how his teacher would often teach him how to play a particular song by holding up his hand. “I could understand it intuitively, tactilely, without using words,” he says. This led him to wonder if it would be possible to replicate this effect in robots.

This robotic exoskeleton can raise and lower each finger independently up to four times per second using separate motors attached to the base of each finger.

To test the device, the researchers recruited 118 experienced pianists who had played for at least 10,000 hours since before they were eight years old and asked them to practice one piece for two weeks until they stopped improving.

The pianists then underwent a 30-minute training session using the exoskeleton, during which they moved their right-hand fingers slowly or quickly in various combinations of simple and complex patterns. This allowed Furuya and his colleagues to pinpoint what type of movement was causing the improvement. .

Pianists who experienced high-speed, complex training were able to better coordinate their right-hand movements and move the fingers of either hand faster, both immediately after training and one day later. This, along with evidence from brain scans, suggests that the training changed the pianists’ sensory cortex, allowing them to better control overall finger movements, Furuya says.

“This is the first time I’ve seen someone use it.” [robotic exoskeletons] It is about learning beyond normal dexterity and beyond what is naturally possible.” Nathan Lepora At the University of Bristol, UK. “Why it worked is a little counterintuitive, because we thought actually performing the movements ourselves spontaneously would be the way we learned. But passive movements seem to work better.”