Pedaling is one of the most important operations for playing the piano. However, it is difficult for people who have lower leg muscle weakness to operate stable pedaling.
The purpose of this study is to develop a pedaling assist system that can be placed at an arbitrary position around the underfoot and control the pedaling based on the extent of the player’s effort.
The system consists of a master pedal near the affected side and a slave pedal near the pedal of the piano. The master pedal measures the angle, which is operated by a player’s foot and the slave pedal controls the power unit and operates the pedal based on the input of the master pedal.
Akira Uehara, Hiroaki Kawamoto and Yoshiyuki Sankai, “A case study of pedaling assist system for piano player with lower leg muscle weakness”, Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2018.
Akira Uehara 