Haptic Touch: A retrofittable tactile sensing glove and haptic feedback armband for scalable and robust sensory feedback

Abstract

Vibrotactile haptic feedback is a non-invasive method of providing tactile sensory feedback to amputees that has been shown to improve prosthetic task performance. However, current haptic feedback technologies remain inaccessible to much of the amputee population due to unscalable, tethered, and non-retrofittable designs that are difficult to distribute. In this work, we propose a wireless, retrofittable, scalable, and distributable haptic feedback system, ‘Haptic Touch’ using flexible PCBs. The proposed system consists of a tactile sensing glove with 27 tactile sensors and a haptic feedback armband with 6 vibration motors: both featuring rechargeable batteries, wireless communication, and embedded processing. As simple demonstrations of potential experiments that can be investigated using Haptic Touch, we conducted two preliminary experiments: 1) evaluating two-point touch vibrotactile discrimination accuracy and 2) evaluating the effect of different haptic feedback strategies on object manipulation. Our results showed that participants were able to discriminate two-point touch stimuli via vibrotactile feedback with 83% accuracy. Furthermore, our object manipulation experiment showed that haptic feedback based on the derivative of force led to a trend of improved performance compared to proportional feedback. Future studies can leverage the Haptic Touch platform developed here as a distributable research tool to further study and optimize vibrotactile sensory feedback for amputees.