Generative Muscle Stimulation: Providing Users with Physical Assistance by Constraining Multimodal-AI with Embodied Knowledge

Electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) can support physical-assistance (e.g., shaking a spray-can before painting). However, EMS-assistance is highly-specialized because it is (1) fixed (e.g., one program for shaking spray-cans, another for opening windows); and (2) non-contextual (e.g., a spray-can for cooking dispenses cooking-oil, not paint—shaking it is unnecessary). Instead, we explore a different approach where muscle-stimulation instructions are generated considering the user’s context (e.g., pose, location, surroundings). The resulting system is more general—enabling unprecedented EMS interactions (e.g., opening a pill bottle) yet also replicating existing systems (e.g., Affordance++) without task-specific programming. It uses computer-vision/large-language-models to generate EMS-instructions, constraining these to a muscle-stimulation knowledge-base & joint-limits. In our user-study, we found participants successfully completed physical-tasks while guided by generative-EMS, even when EMS-instructions were (purposely) erroneous. Participants understood generated gestures and, even during forced-errors, understood partial-instructions, identified errors, and re-prompted the system. We believe our concept marks a shift toward more general-purpose EMS-interfaces.