Abstract
Visually impaired licensed therapists must have the ability to perceive stiffness through their fingertips in the school for the blind. The teachers strive to provide careful introductory education based on a quantitative assessment of new students’ basic stiffness perception. However, assessment materials to help teachers understand new students’ stiffness perception are lacking. This study aimed to develop suitable fundamental assessment materials that visually impaired licensed teachers could use to quantitatively assess the difference in the stiffness perception ability of beginning learners in the early stages of learning. They were asked to discriminate the presented materials one at a time, which consisted of thermoplastic elastomers with different degrees of stiffness. We used these materials to compare the beginning learners’ ability to perceive stiffness with that of teachers and found that teachers answered correctly at an overall significantly higher rate. Specifically, the teachers’ correct response rate (78.8%) for the stiffness perception of all presented stimuli was approximately 15% higher than the beginning learners’ correct response rate (64.2%). These results revealed areas of stiffness that are difficult for beginning learners to identify.
Highlights
Human beings use their five senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—to recognize various stimuli in daily life [1]
We developed suitable fundamental assessment materials that visually impaired licensed teachers could use to quantitatively assess the difference in stiffness perception ability in beginning learners and instruct them in the early stages of learning
To claim that the gap in stiffness perception between the groups can be reduced on the basis of the results of this experiment, it will be necessary to confirm the change in stiffness perception with the continued use of our assessment materials in the future
Summary
Human beings use their five senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—to recognize various stimuli in daily life [1]. The external stimuli that humans perceive through the skin include pressure, vibration, and temperature. Whereas human skin has sensory receptors on its surface [4], deeper parts of the human body use deep sensory receptors [5]. Such receptors acquire a vast amount and wide range of information, including the degree of body stiffness [6]. Study of the human sense of touch advances fields such as haptics, robotics, and medical telepresence [7,8]. Robotic research includes remote and invasive measurements of stiffness for haptic information transmission [9,10]
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