A robotic hand exoskeleton can help expert pianists learn to play even faster by moving their fingers for them.

Robotic exoskeletons have long been used to rehabilitate people who can no longer use their hands due to an injury or medical condition, but using them to improve the abilities of able-bodied people has been less well explored.

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

“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpractising,” says Furuya. “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpractising and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practising.”

Furuya remembered that his teachers used to show him how to play certain pieces by placing their hands over his. “I understood haptically, or more intuitively, without using any words,” he says. This made him wonder whether a robot might be able to replicate this effect.

The robotic exoskeleton can raise and lower each finger individually, up to four times a second, using a separate motor attached to the base of each finger.

To test the device, the researchers recruited 118 expert pianists who had all played since before they had turned 8 years old and for at least 10,000 hours, and asked them to practise a piece for two weeks until they couldn’t improve.

Then, the pianists received a 30-minute training session with the exoskeleton, which moved the fingers of their right hand in different combinations of simple and complex patterns, either slowly or quickly, so that Furuya and his colleagues could pinpoint what movement type caused improvement.

The pianists who experienced the fast and complex training could better coordinate their right hand movements and move the fingers of either hand faster, both immediately after training and a day later. This, together with evidence from brain scans, indicates that the training changed the pianists’ sensory cortices to better control finger movements in general, says Furuya.

“This is the first time I’ve seen somebody use [robotic exoskeletons] to go beyond normal capabilities of dexterity, to push your learning past what you could do naturally,” says Nathan Lepora at the University of Bristol, UK. “It’s a bit counterintuitive why it worked, because you would have thought that actually performing the movements yourself voluntarily would be the way to learn, but it seems passive movements do work.”

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