Fabrication and evaluation of a thin film vibrotactile actuator made with silicon dioxide

Abstract

One of the most important challenges in bringing haptic information to mobile devices is to develop a haptic actuator with a volume small enough that it can be easily inserted into mobile devices. The haptic information, which is created in the form of vibration, should have large enough magnitude to stimulate all mechanoreceptors in a wide frequency range for increasing the sense of reality. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a wideband film-type haptic actuator based on silicon dioxide (SiO2), designed to have sufficiently large magnitude to stimulate all mechanoreceptors in human skin in broad frequency bandwidth. We conduct experiments to measure the vibration strength of the proposed actuator in a wide frequency range and its displacement behavior according to the amount of voltage input. The results show that the actuator has sufficiently large vibrational force to stimulate human skin in a wide frequency range and proportional displacement behavior as a function of the applied input voltage. The obtained results indicate that the proposed actuator can selectively stimulate human’ mechanoreceptors and that it has feasibility for haptic actuators embedded into mobile devices.