Abstract
As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of objects, like weight, temperature, textures, and motion, etc. In fact, those properties are nerve stimuli to our brain received by different kinds of receptors in the skin. Mechanical, electrical, and thermal stimuli can stimulate these receptors and cause different information to be conveyed through the nerves. Technologies for actuators to provide mechanical, electrical or thermal stimuli have been developed. These include static or vibrational actuation, electrostatic stimulation, focused ultrasound, and more. Smart materials, such as piezoelectric materials, carbon nanotubes, and shape memory alloys, play important roles in providing actuation for tactile sensation. This paper aims to review the background biological knowledge of human tactile sensing, to give an understanding of how we sense and interact with the world through the sense of touch, as well as the conventional and state-of-the-art technologies of tactile actuators for tactile feedback delivery.
Highlights
Tian Liu 1, Juncai Xu 4, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA; Medtronic, Inc., Tempe, AZ 85286, USA
Merkel receptors are the primary receptors that are used in reading Braille
Their best sensitivity to skin indentation is found in the range of 5 Hz to 15 Hz, at which frequency, a minimum skin indentation on the order of 50 μm is typically required to produce a response [7]
Summary
By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of objects, like weight, temperature, textures, and motion, etc Those properties are nerve stimuli to our brain received by different kinds of receptors in the skin. Technologies for actuators to provide mechanical, electrical or thermal stimuli have been developed These include static or vibrational actuation, electrostatic stimulation, focused ultrasound, and more. There are four main types of mechanoreceptors that react to different kinds of stimuli information, such as vibration, shear, texture, and pressure. These four receptors are called Pacinian corpuscles, Meissner’s corpuscles, Merkel’s discs, and Ruffini endings [1]. Their best sensitivity to skin indentation is found in the range of 5 Hz to 15 Hz, at which frequency, a minimum skin indentation on the order of 50 μm is typically required to produce a response [7]
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