Abstract
The human finger plays an extremely important role in tactile perception, but little is known about how age and gender affect its biophysical properties and their role in tactile perception. We combined studies on contact characteristics, mechanical properties and surface topography to understand age and gender effects on the human finger. The values obtained regarding contact characteristics (i.e. adhesive force) were significantly higher for women than for men. As for mechanical properties (i.e. Young's modulus E), a significant and positive correlation with age was observed and found to be higher for women. A positive correlation was observed between age and the arithmetic mean of surface roughness for men. However, an inverse age effect was highlighted for women. The age and gender effects obtained have never been reported previously in the literature. These results open new perspectives for understanding the weakening of tactile perception across ages and how it differs between men and women.
Highlights
IntroductionHuman sensing capacities weaken (vision, hearing, taste and smell) over time
Concerning the finger’s contact properties, the adhesive force measured for men and women as a function of age is presented in figure 4a
The results show a very clear gender effect with higher adhesive forces for women
Summary
Human sensing capacities weaken (vision, hearing, taste and smell) over time. A similar decrease is expected to occur for touch sensation and perception. Studying and interpreting the effects of ageing on touch remain challenging tasks [1]. Different studies have focused on understanding tactile perception in different applications such as remote surgery, virtual reality, product design, tactile deficiency detection and rehabilitation, e-shopping and smart surfaces [2,3,4]. Tactile perception is based on the sensory information obtained from the central nervous system.
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