Bioelastic state recovery for haptic sensory substitution.

The rich set of mechanoreceptors found in human skin offers a versatile engineering interface for transmitting information and eliciting perceptions, potentially serving a broad range of applications in patient care and other important industries. Targeted multisensory engagement of these afferent units, however, faces persistent challenges, especially for wearable, programmable systems that need to operate adaptively across the body. Here we present a miniaturized electromechanical structure that, when combined with skin as an elastic, energy-storing element, supports bistable, self-sensing modes of deformation.

Realism of Tactile Texture Playback: A Combination of Stretch and Vibration.

This study investigates the effects of two stimulation modalities (stretch and vibration) on natural touch sensation on the volar forearm. The skin-textile interaction was implemented by scanning three textures across the left forearm. The resulting skin displacements were recorded by the digital image correlation technique to capture the information imparted by the textures.

The Single-Pitch Texel: A flexible and practical texture-rendering algorithm.

As the number of applications for tactile feedback technology rapidly increases, so too does the need for efficient, flexible, and extensible representations of virtual textures. The previously introduced Single-Pitch Texel rendering algorithm offers designers the ability to produce textures with perceptually wide-band spectral characteristics while requiring very few input parameters. This paper expands on the capabilities of the rendering algorithm.

The spatial profile of skin indentation shapes tactile perception across stimulus frequencies.

Multiple human sensory systems exhibit sensitivity to spatial and temporal variations of physical stimuli. Vision has evolved to offer high spatial acuity with limited temporal sensitivity, while audition has developed complementary characteristics. Neural coding in touch has been believed to transition from a spatial to a temporal domain in relation to surface scale, such that coarse features (e.