CHS: Small: ETouch - Amplifying the Sense of Touch

Drexel University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite advances in haptic (touch) technologies, current interactive systems make limited use of the sensorimotor capabilities of the human body. Not surprisingly, then, the enhancement of intrinsic touch sensation has received little prior attention. The PI's overarching goal in this research is to create knowledge and technology for tactile sensing and feedback, in order to realize a glove that enhances touch perception by electronically amplifying tactile sensations, thereby greatly extending the limits of normal human haptic perception. This will enable its wearer to feel objects with heightened sensitivity, and to discern fine levels of detail in surfaces, objects, or tissues. Project outcomes will include enabling technologies for hand-worn instruments that can amplify touch much like a hearing aid is able to amplify sound, or a digital microscope can magnify images. The wearer of such a device will be able to feel defects in surfaces that would not normally be detected, to detect lumps that would otherwise go unnoticed, and to perform fine manipulation tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Thus, the project holds the potential to impact a wide range of human activities and industries, many of which depend upon manual interaction and inspection. As part of the current project, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Department of Neurology, the PI will develop new methods for sensory assessment and guidelines for tactile enhancement with broad implications for clinical applications to the rehabilitation of touch deficits caused by disease or injury affecting the somatosensory system. Further applications in sensory feedback for upper-limb prosthetics and rehabilitation are envisioned to be directly facilitated by knowledge generated in this way. This project will pioneer new methods for electronic sensing of the mechanical stimuli underlying touch sensations in the hand, for computational enhancement of perceptually relevant haptic features, and for reproducing touch sensations via distributed actuators of a wearable, glove-like electronic interface, by integrating work in tactile sensing, computational analysis, distributed actuation and control, and real-time touch amplification. The PI will design and fabricate new soft computing technologies for capturing, processing, and reproducing touch sensations felt with the hand, in the form of strain and vibration signatures of skin-object contact. Challenges to realizing such a vision include: the multiple time and length scales involved; the complexity of the mechanical stimuli, which consist of complex, movement-dependent distributed strain in the skin; limitations in current knowledge about the fundamental computations underlying sensory processing, which obscure the relevant signal features; and the difficulty of electronically reproducing distributed touch sensations during whole-hand haptic interaction. The work will contribute to advances in each of these areas, first by designing and fabricating new sensor and actuator technologies, and then by using these to reveal how touch sensation is elicited through contact generated mechanical signals, and how these sensations are processed by the perceptual system.