EMS-Grasping: Providing Finger with Force Feedback for Grasping Virtual Objects Using Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Tao Huang, Zikang Dong, Jialong Liu, Hongbo Yao, Fenghan Zhou, Haoqiang Hua, Xiangmin Xu, Lin Shu

Abstract: There are some limitations in the application of electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) in virtual reality (VR) that provides precise force feedback to the fingers. To address this issue, we propose EMS-Grasping, an interaction technique that combines biomechanical simulation model with EMS. This work makes two key contributions: (1) an EMS-based musculoskeletal model of the hand is constructed to establish the relationship between the electrical stimulation intensity and the angle of the finger joint; (2) a simulation model-based method for EMS control of finger fixation at a target angle is proposed and applied to grasping virtual objects in VR. In the first experiment, we verified the reliability of the simulation model. In the second experiment, we compared three interaction models to evaluate the performance of EMS-Grasping. The results show that EMS-Grasping not only effectively reduces finger penetration with virtual objects, but also enhances the user experience in terms of realism and comfort. This implies that EMS-Grasping has good potential in expressing grasping virtual objects.