TOWARDS OBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT OF OWNERSHIP OVER A PROSTHESIS

Abstract

Conventional motor assessments provide limited actionable information to prosthetic clinicians and engineers. Recent work has sought to develop objective ways to measure psychological aspects of a person controlling a prosthesis to develop more powerful motor assessment tools. One area of emphasis has been to develop a way to objectively measure device ownership, a key component of embodiment. Assessment of ownership has historically been limited to subjective questionnaires but here we use a spatial interference reaction time task, the crossmodal congruency task (CCT), to objectively assess this key factor in supporting prosthesis use. We improve the CCT protocol to increase its usability. We aim to establish a causal link between ‘device ownership’ and the crossmodal congruency effect, a correlational link observed in previous work. In this paper we summarize our efforts to develop a comprehensive platform to assess ownership and share results from an initial study.