Gloved work has been shown to increase the effort required to perform manual tasks. In power grip tasks, these differences have been observed as reductions in strength and increases in muscular effort. Decreases in force output have been attributed to a number of factors, including loss of tactile sensitivity, glove flexibility or suppleness, thickness, changes in hand geometry, and friction at the glove-object interface. Glove research has rarely quantified glove attributes, and often compared gloves of varying material and physical properties. This research had the unique opportunity to control for a number of these properties by using three sets of identical gloves (powerline maintainers? insulating rubber gloves), differing only in thickness. <br /><br /> Administering the Von Frey Hair Test indicated that the gloves did indeed decrease tactile sensitivity. This research showed that increasing glove thickness led to large decreases in maximum power grip force. Small changes in hand geometry, such as increased interdigital space or grip span, affected force output. In the same hand posture, participants increased their grip force with increasing glove thickness for the object lifting task but were able to maintain a fixed submaximal force with visual feedback. The decrease in tactile sensitivity is a likely cause of this difference. <br /><br /> Muscular activity was affected by wearing the gloves while performing manual tasks. Inconsistent responses of muscular activation were seen in gloved maximum grip effort, while overall increases in electromyographic activity were recorded for tasks at submaximal levels when wearing gloves. <br /><br /> Interdigital spacing had different effects on maximal and submaximal tasks. For maximum effort power grip, interdigital spacing decreased force output by as much as 10%, with no significant changes in muscle activation. For submaximal tasks, no significant differences were seen in muscular activity or in force output. The overall force capability of the gloved user is hindered by changes in interdigital spacing at near maximal effort, but does not appear to be for tasks requiring lower grip force, such as the lifting task which required roughly 20%MVC. Overall, the effect of wearing these gloves on the users, the powerline maintainers, is a substantially increased effort to work. This research contributes to a greater understanding of why and how gloves inhibit performance.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Work in many environments with chemical or biological agents requires the use of personal protective equipment such as gloves and respirators. It is well established that glove thickness affects finger dexterity. There is further evidence that visual constraints (e.g., visual acuity) and gender may also impede finger dexterity. Therefore, the personal protection may place a barrier to the agent, but performance or productivity will decrease. The purpose of this study is to examine the potential effects of gloves and visual acuity as well as gender and first order interactions on task performance using standard dexterity tests. Five men and five women volunteered as participants in the study. There were four levels of gloves: None (as control), 9 mil, 18 mil, and 28 mil unlined latext gloves were used. There were five levels of visual acuity: None as a negative control, masked goggles as a positive control, and masked goggles with occlusion foils of 20/50, 20/100 and <20/300. A full factorial design was used and the combinations were randomly assigned. Three platforms were used for this study: Prudue Pegboard, Grooved Pegboard and the placing task of the Minnesota Dexterity Test. These results showed that the main factors of Glove and Goggle were significant for all platforms and Gender was significant for the Purdue Pegboard and Grooved Pegboard. There were significant interactions among the main effects but these did not demonstrate a consistent pattern. The largest differences in performance were associated with the gloves, even at the last thickness of 9 mil. The increased thickness to 18 and 28 mil resulted in significant and large losses of performance. It was most marked with the smallerpieces of the pegboard tasks. Generally women performed better than men for the pegboard tasks as expected and there were no differences for the larger pieces of the Minnesota tasks. Except for the greatest decrement in visual acuity, the differences among the levels of visual acuity were not significant. The expectedinteraction between gloves and acuity was not observed.

Gloved work has been shown to increase the effort required to perform manual tasks. In power grip tasks, these differences have been observed as reductions in strength and increases in muscular effort. Decreases in force output have been attributed to a number of factors, including loss of tactile sensitivity, glove flexibility or suppleness, thickness, changes in hand geometry, and friction at the glove-object interface. Glove research has rarely quantified glove attributes, and often compared gloves of varying material and physical properties. This research had the unique opportunity to control for a number of these properties by using three sets of identical gloves (powerline maintainers? insulating rubber gloves), differing only in thickness. <br /><br /> Administering the Von Frey Hair Test indicated that the gloves did indeed decrease tactile sensitivity. This research showed that increasing glove thickness led to large decreases in maximum power grip force. Small changes in hand geometry, such as increased interdigital space or grip span, affected force output. In the same hand posture, participants increased their grip force with increasing glove thickness for the object lifting task but were able to maintain a fixed submaximal force with visual feedback. The decrease in tactile sensitivity is a likely cause of this difference. <br /><br /> Muscular activity was affected by wearing the gloves while performing manual tasks. Inconsistent responses of muscular activation were seen in gloved maximum grip effort, while overall increases in electromyographic activity were recorded for tasks at submaximal levels when wearing gloves. <br /><br /> Interdigital spacing had different effects on maximal and submaximal tasks. For maximum effort power grip, interdigital spacing decreased force output by as much as 10%, with no significant changes in muscle activation. For submaximal tasks, no significant differences were seen in muscular activity or in force output. The overall force capability of the gloved user is hindered by changes in interdigital spacing at near maximal effort, but does not appear to be for tasks requiring lower grip force, such as the lifting task which required roughly 20%MVC. Overall, the effect of wearing these gloves on the users, the powerline maintainers, is a substantially increased effort to work. This research contributes to a greater understanding of why and how gloves inhibit performance.

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Despite the growing popularity and expansion of video game interaction techniques and research in the area of hand gesture recognition, the application of hand gesture video game interaction using arm, hand, and finger motion has not been extensively explored. Most current gesture-based approaches to video game interaction neglect the use of the fingers for interaction, but inclusion of the fingers will allow for more natural and unique interaction and merits further research. To implement arm, hand and finger-based interaction for the video game domain, several problems must be solved including gesture recognition, segmentation, hand visualization, and video game interaction that responds to arm, hand, and finger input. Solutions to each of these problems have been implemented. The potential of this interaction style is illustrated through the introduction of an arm, hand, and finger controlled video game system that responds to players' hand gestures. It includes a finger-gesture recognizer as well as a video game system employing various interaction styles. This consists of a first person shooter game, a driving game, and a menu interaction system. Several users interacted with and played these games, and this form of interaction is especially suitable for real time interaction in first-person games. This is perhaps the first implementation of its kind for video game interaction. Based on test results, arm, hand, and finger interaction a viable form of interaction that deserves further research. This implementation bridges the gap between existing gesture interaction methods and more advanced virtual reality techniques. It successfully combines the solutions to each problem mentioned above into a single, working video game system. This type of interaction has proved to be more intuitive than existing gesture controls in many situations and also less complex to implement than a full virtual reality setup. It allows more control by using the hands' natural motion and allows each hand to interact independently. It can also be reliably implemented using today's technology. This implementation is a base system that can be greatly expanded on. Many possibilities for future work can be applied to this form of interaction.

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In my final work I deal with the topic of handicap, disability and otherness. Any otherness causes fear in society, fear of ignorance. Being healthy, "normal," means the assumption of a full-fledged life of modern man. A disabled person, whether physically or mentally, does not meet these priorities and ideas of normality. I try to point out the handicap positively, not to hide it. I also work on the qualities of beauty and ugliness because they are very similar to health and disability issues. My final work is focused on the affected bodies. The result is a set of exposed objects that, in conjunction with the installation, can act as luxury goods. The work consists of about fifteen hand-sewn gloves of various shapes and materials. They are very extraordinary objects that only "sit" for the chosen. The aim of the work is to contribute to works that seek to promote disability in art or culture.

Exposure to severe levels of hand-arm vibration can lead to hand-arm vibration syndrome. Towards curbing the development of hand-arm vibration syndrome, studies have shown that anti-vibration gloves effectively reduce the transmission of unwanted vibration from vibrating equipment to the human hand. However, most of these studies have focused on the study of anti-vibration gloves for power tools such as chipping hammers, and not much work has been done to design anti-vibration gloves for steering wheels. Also, as most of these studies are based on experimental or modeling techniques, the level of effectiveness and optimum glove properties for better performance remains unclear. To fill this gap, the dynamics of the hand-arm system, with and without gloves, coupled to a steering wheel is studied analytically in this work. A lumped parameter model of the hand-arm system with hand-tool interaction is modeled as a linear spring-damper system. The model is validated by comparing transmissibility obtained numerically to transmissibility obtained from experiments. The resulting governing equations of motion are solved analytically using the method of undetermined coefficients. Parametric analysis is performed on the biomechanical model of the hand-arm system with and without a glove to identify key design parameters. It is observed that the effect of glove parameters on its performance varies based on the frequency range. This observation further motivates us to optimize the glove parameters, using multi-objective optimization, to minimize the overall transmissibility in different frequency ranges. / Master of Science / When the human hand is exposed for a long time to vibrations generated from hand-held tools, such as Jack-hammers, rock breakers and chipping hammers, humans are in danger of developing hand-arm vibration syndrome. Hand-arm vibration syndrome is dangerous as severe episodes of this syndrome could lead to gangrene and eventually amputation of the fingers. To prevent the occurrence of hand-arm vibration syndrome, some researchers have explored the effectiveness of anti-vibration gloves through experiments. However, no work has been performed to identify the optimal glove design that best optimizes an anti-vibration glove for steering wheel applications. To address this issue, this thesis studied a mathematical model of the human-hand, wearing an anti-vibration glove attached to a steering wheel system. To ensure this model could successfully replicate real life applications, measurements computed with the model were compared with measurements on the human-hand obtained from experiments. After successfully ensuring that the model closely replicated real-life measurements, the model was used to design an Anti-vibration glove with optimal values to protect the hand from hand-arm vibration syndrome.