TY - JOUR T1 - Sensing Glove for Brain Studies: Design and assessment of its Compatibility for fMRI with a Robust Test JF - IEEE - ASME Transactions on Mechatronics Y1 - 2008 A1 - N. Vanello A1 - V. Hartwig A1 - M. Tesconi A1 - E. Ricciardi A1 - A. Tognetti A1 - G. Zupone A1 - R. Gassert A1 - D. Chapuis A1 - N. Sgambelluri A1 - E. P. Scilingo A1 - G. Giovannetti A1 - V. Positano A1 - M. F. Santarelli A1 - A. Bicchi A1 - P. Pietrini A1 - D. De Rossi A1 - L. Landini KW - Haptics KW - Robotics AB -

In this paper, we describe a biomimetic-fabric-based sensing glove that can be used tomonitor hand posture and gesture. Our device is made of a distributed sensor network of piezoresistive conductive elastomers integrated into an elastic fabric. This solution does not affect natural movement and hand gestures, and can be worn for a long time with no discomfort. The glove could be fruitfully employed in behavioral and functional studies with functional MRI (fMRI) during specific tactile or motor tasks. To assess MR compatibility of the system, a statistical test on phantoms is introduced. This test can also be used for testing the compatibility of mechatronic devices designed to produce different stimuli inside the MR environment. We propose a statistical test to evaluate changes in SNR and time-domain standard deviations between image sequences acquired under different experimental conditions. fMRI experiments on subjects wearing the glove are reported. The reproducibility of fMRIresults obtained with andwithout the glove was estimated. A good similarity between the activated regions was found in the two conditions.

VL - 13 ER -