Touch Feeling Research Articles

A bioinspired tactile scanner for computer haptics

Computer haptics (CH) is about integration of tactile sensation and rendering in Metaverse. However, unlike computer vision (CV) where both hardware infrastructure and software programs are well developed, a generic tactile data capturing device that serves the same role as what a camera does for CV, is missing. Bioinspired by electrophysiological processes in human tactile somatosensory nervous system, here we propose a tactile scanner along with a neuromorphically-engineered system, in which a closed-loop tactile acquisition and rendering (re-creation) are preliminarily achieved. Based on the architecture of afferent nerves and intelligent functions of mechano-gating and leaky integrate-and-fire models, such a tactile scanner is designed and developed by using piezoelectric transducers as axon neurons and thin film transistor (TFT)-based neuromorphic circuits to mimic synaptic behaviours and neural functions. As an example, the neuron-like tactile information of surface textures is captured and further used to render the texture friction of a virtual surface for “recreating” a “true” feeling of touch.

Beyond trans* medicalisation: hapticality and the art of crafting trans*masculine identities in Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014)

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented rise in trans* representation in literature, with works of fictions that go from critically acclaimed best sellers like Torrey Peters’ Detransition Baby (2021) to Booker-Prize winner postcolonial-centred study of non-binary characters in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019). In this blossoming context of exploring trans* voices, Ali Smith’s How to be both (2014) breaks the mould in its defiance of traditional representations of transivity, usually grounded on medico-legal discourses. Following the precept of transnormativity as well as the theories of hapticality of Jeanne Vaccaro and Laura Marks, which respectively explore the possibilities of trans* identity perceived as a collective process of crafting and the potential found in a haptical approach to the visual, I hereby discuss Smith’s representation of trans*masculine identity outside the regime of medicine. Pivoting around Smith’s conceptualisation of ‘the painter self’, an original reinterpretation of trans* identity as expressed and crafted through the arts and the feeling of touch, I offer an analysis of the continual process of becoming of trans* Renaissance character Francescho del Cossa. Moreover, I offer analyses on the impact others may have on one’s own trans* identity, with an interest on the trans* joy that comes from acceptance and on the role of arts to outgrow the pain that comes from rejection. Finally, I examine the role of the visual in the artistic representation of transivity, where Smith defies the limits of time, portraying trans* identity as the true never-ending process.

Cries of Pleasure and Pain: Vocalizations Communicating How Touch Feels in Romantic Relationships

ABSTRACT Research on interaction has recently ventured into the domain of sensoriality, hitherto considered inaccessible for video analysis. This article contributes to this emerging field by targeting the interface of touch and vocal sound, dissecting the intersubjective potential of sounding when bodies are intertwined. Studying naturally occurring affective episodes between romantic partners at their homes with the methods of multimodal interaction analysis, we demonstrate how vocalization can express comfort and thus lead to extension of mutual bodily contact, or inform of discomfort, which leads to swift release of the problematic contact. We argue that, by providing immediate and nuanced access to other participants’ ongoing bodily experiences, haptic sensoriality is partially distributed into the auditory domain. The relevance of progressivity in body contact is continuously negotiated and has moral, social, and relational implications, providing grounds for continuous realization of consent. Data are in Finnish.

Writing touch, writing (epistemic) vulnerability

AbstractTouch mediates relations between self‐other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. This paper is the outcome of writing touch as a collaborative activity between eight women writers across different times and locals. In sharing experiences of touch during and beyond the pandemic, we engage with collaborative writing articulated here as colligere, involving the assembling of writing in a holding space. The meanings and feelings of touch arise from our distinct writer positionalities as we think, work, and write in and about life, research, organizations, and organizing. We suggest that writing that reflects on/through touch presents epistemic vulnerability and openness to unknowing in the nexus of intercorporeal relationships. Writing touch contributes to writing and doing academia differently, particularly by offering sensorial encounters that reframe the ethico‐political conditions of academic knowledge creation.

Falling Out of Postural Instability: Evaluating the Contribution of Somatosensation to Standing Balance in Parkinson's Disease

People with PD (PwPD) experience a variety of motor symptoms, including postural instability, impaired gait, tremors, and falls. Falls among PwPD are especially debilitating, as they can result in fracture risk, increased progression of the disease, and even death. Previous research has demonstrated that the somatosensory system, consisting of tactile sensation (which is responsible for feelings of touch and pressure) and proprioceptive feedback (which is important in joint position sense), is crucial for reactive balance control. The primary goal of this project was to determine the unique contributions of the tactile and proprioceptive systems to standing balance control in PD. Participants at the Gait and Balance Disorders Lab at Arizona State University were asked to maintain their balance while experiencing 3 sensory vibration conditions from vibrotactile transducers 1) a control condition with no vibration, 2) vibration underneath the feet to disturb tactile sensation, and 3) vibration on top of their feet (dorsiflexor tendon) to manipulate proprioception. Another goal was to identify predictors of somatosensory impairment during standing balance (i.e., participants affected most by sensory vibration) by associating clinical characteristics with change scores in balance outcomes from the no vibration-control condition to the tactile and proprioceptive stimulation conditions. The results of this study indicate that vibrotactile stimulation had minimal impacts on standing balance responses. This study also found few predictors of somatosensory impairments. Further research is needed to enhance clinical efficiency in designing treatments that have the most impact on improving balance control and preventing falls.

Brief temporal perturbations in somatosensory reafference disrupt perceptual and neural attenuation and increase supplementary motor area-cerebellar connectivity.

Intrinsic delays in sensory feedback can be detrimental for motor control. As a compensation strategy, the brain predicts the sensory consequences of movement via a forward model on the basis of a copy of the motor command. Using these predictions, the brain attenuates somatosensory reafference to facilitate the processing of exafferent information. Theoretically, this predictive attenuation is disrupted by (even minimal) temporal errors between the predicted and actual reafference; however, direct evidence of such disruption is lacking since previous neuroimaging studies contrasted nondelayed reafferent input with exafferent input. Here, we combined psychophysics with functional magnetic resonance imaging to test whether subtle perturbations in the timing of somatosensory reafference disrupt its predictive processing. Twenty-eight participants (14 women) generated touches on their left index finger by tapping a sensor with their right index finger. The touches on the left index finger were delivered close to the time of the two fingers' contact or with a temporal perturbation (i.e., 153 ms delay). We found that such a brief temporal perturbation disrupted the attenuation of the somatosensory reafference at both the perceptual and neural levels, leading to greater somatosensory and cerebellar responses and weaker somatosensory connectivity with the cerebellum, proportional to the perceptual changes. We interpret these effects as the failure of the forward model to predictively attenuate the perturbed somatosensory reafference. Moreover, we observed increased connectivity of the supplementary motor area with the cerebellum during the perturbations, which could indicate the return of the temporal prediction error to the motor centers.Significance statementOur brain receives somatosensory feedback from our movements with a delay. To counteract these delays, motor control theories postulate that the brain predicts the timing of somatosensory consequences of our movements and attenuates sensations received at that time. Thus, a self-generated touch feels weaker than an identical external touch. However, how subtle temporal errors between the predicted and actual somatosensory feedback perturb this predictive attenuation remains unknown. We show that such errors make the otherwise attenuated touch feel stronger, elicit stronger somatosensory responses, weaken cerebellar connectivity with somatosensory areas, and increase this connectivity with motor areas. These findings show that motor and cerebellar areas are fundamental in forming temporal predictions about the sensory consequences of our movements.

From leather wastes to leather: enhancement of low quality leather using collagen recovered from leather tanned wastes

Leather industry produces huge amounts of solid wastes. In the last decade, several methods for the recovery and valorization of these wastes were developed, mainly focused on the extraction of collagen using chemical methods. The extracted collagen, due to its poor quality, is mostly used in agriculture as a nitrogen source ingredient of fertilizers. This study aims to apply collagen, extracted from leather tanned solid wastes using a recently reported new process based on enzymatic hydrolysis, as filling agent for low quality leather. Thanks to the enzymatic hydrolysis, collagen can be extracted without affecting its integrity and, therefore, its quality. In order to use the extracted collagen as filler for low quality leather, an enzymatic mediated cross-linking reaction between collagen and casein was developed. The enzymatic cross-linking reaction was added as an additional phase of the re-tanning process or as a replacement of one of the re-tanning steps. To evaluate the filling effect, thickness of the treated leather was measured and infrared and microscopy analyses were performed, comparing the new methods to the traditional standard one. The mechanical properties of the filled leather were tested and the sensorial features, such as fullness and touch feelings, were estimated through a panel test. Results suggest the high potential of extracted collagen to be employed back in leather processing both as additive and as substitutive filler.Graphical abstractAims and goals of the research study: comparison between re-designed (green workflow) and traditional re-tanning process (grey workflow).

78‐1: Invited Paper: Tactile Scanner as Neuromorphic Skin for Computer Haptics

In computer haptics, haptic devices provide sensory feedback that simulates physical properties and forces for recreating a feeling of touch when interacting with a virtual object. To generate such a feeling, a tactile sensor is required to collect tactile information similar to what human hand or skin does and then render it to drive a high‐fidelity artificial skin for tactile display. In this work, a flexible tactile scanner with a TFT‐based neuromorphic circuit as sensor interface is proposed to acquire tactile information with bionic characteristics. In order to recognize and classify different materials and textured surfaces, such a neuromorphic signal conversion is of necessity to generate neuromorphic data that can be used for artificial neuron network training and learning. Further, the following labelled bionic tactile information can be utilized to generate a motor‐neuron‐like signal to drive a high‐fidelity bionic neuromorphic skin for tactile display, enabling to generate a touch feeling of a virtual object in Metaverse. Therefore, as the first step, a tactile scanner as neuromorphic skin must be used to acquire tactile data for such a purpose.

“DIRTY HANDS” AND TROUBLED CONSCIENCE: REFLECTIONS ON THE FATE OF INDIVIDUALISM IN THE SHORT STORY “SYLUETY” BY MYKOLA KHVYLOVY

The paper focuses on the complex issues of the short story Syluety’ (1923) by Mykola Khvylovy (1893–1933): the study of the motif of hands, the examination of how the traumatized characters experience spatiality (the space of a room), the dialectic of the body suffering from the consequences of the 1917 revolution, the indirect influence of filmic practice (inter-frame editing, the camera position of the narrator) on the artistic manifestation of the writer’s individual style. The religious, namely Christian, aspects previously described by Yurii Bezkhutryi were further elaborated. Special attention has been given to the characters of Dema and Veronika, who correlate with the author in terms of both biographical and artistic aspects, as well as some psychoanalytic features. The exceptionally complex deep-seated feelings of the characters touch upon the intersection of the fictional “reality” of the work of art and the reader’s present reality, as this piece of narrative is a vivid example of the analysis of relations between people in terms of their dissatisfaction with day-to-day reality and their desire for the ideal. Much like a cinema screen on which a film runs, presenting to the viewer what is to be seen and how it is visually perceived, Mykola Khvylovy conventionally does this in his fiction. The short story under study is a drama of the commonness of social reality, where the characters have already crossed the threshold of their private illusion (desire for change, desire to be needed, desire to love) to face disappointment (phobia) and then proceed to a next level of illusion. The study employs a system of biographical, systemic, hermeneutical, cultural, historical and poetic methods, justified by the specific nature of the survey, its object and subject. The findings are to prove useful to all those involved in the study of the Ukrainian writer’s signature world-view; the analysis of the Ukrainian literature of the first half of the twentieth century development; for experts in artistic anthropology and cultural art.

Metaverse Awareness and Generation to Transform Education

With each passing second, the huge information flow of social media has transformed many habits and behaviors of people. The effects of social media have been discussed in the field of education as in every field, and it has been stated in studies that it increases motivation when used in education. Nowadays, with the change of Facebook’s name into “Meta”, discussions of Metaverse as a Web 3.0 technology have started. Understanding the concept of Metaverse, which means Virtual Universe, is important for educators to understand the subject and design new instructional models. In this study, it is aimed to examine the transformation of education with the metaverse awareness and metaverse generation. The literature was scanned with the document analysis technique and the subject was discussed with the titles of “The Concept of Metaverse”, “Metaverse and Education”, “Metaverse Awareness” and “Transformation of Education with the Metaverse Generation”. As a result, in an educational environment without huge campuses or buildings, it is expected that the education of the metaverse generation will take a completely different turn with the haptic clothes that will provide the feeling of touch in the virtual metaverse world. In this direction, it is important that the Metaverse awareness is formed correctly in these days, which are preparing the ground for transformation in education.

Shifting Design Perspectives: Touch, Co-Location, and Sharing Objects during the Pandemic

HCI research has explored a variety of technologies to support human-to-human touch by simulating or mediating the feeling of touch over distance. Restrictions in activities involving touch, close contact, and physical proximity due to the COVID-19 pandemic have made it more pertinent to understand and investigate the goals, opportunities, and limitations of technologically mediated touch. We conducted an exploratory interview study with 18 participants across the United States in April and June of 2021 to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s attitudes towards engaging in touch, being co-located, and sharing physical objects. We observed four themes: new efforts to evaluate safety, new preferences for physically co-locating without touch, technology solutions amplifying separation, and a newfound appreciation for human touch and touch-adjacent activities. These results suggest that future touch technologies may need to shift focus from simulating human touch convincingly to allowing for interactions that incorporate these emergent sensitivities to safety and preferences for physical co-location.

What Makes Touch Comfortable? An Examination of Touch Giving and Receiving in Two Cultures.

This study examined how touch role and culture shape affective touch experiences. Germans (N = 130) and Chinese (N = 130) were surveyed once as toucher and once as touchee. For different touch actions, they (a) provided free-text descriptions of what prompts touch, (b) indicated with whom touch feels comfortable, and (c) highlighted areas of touch comfort on a body outline. Overall, touch was prompted by affectionate feelings, was more comfortable with more closely bonded individuals, and when directed at the upper arms, shoulders, and upper back. Touch role mattered for the experiences prompting touch in that touchees felt less positive than touchers. Culture differentiated touch comfort topographies. Compared with Chinese, Germans felt more comfortable with more intimate touch to the torso and upper back and less comfortable with more public touch to the hands. Notably, however, examining touch role and culture revealed more overlap than divergence, ensuring mutual comfort as individuals physically connect.

The positive dimension of schizotypy is associated with a reduced attenuation and precision of self-generated touch

The brain predicts the sensory consequences of our movements and uses these predictions to attenuate the perception of self-generated sensations. Accordingly, self-generated touch feels weaker than an externally generated touch of identical intensity. In schizophrenia, this somatosensory attenuation is substantially reduced, suggesting that patients with positive symptoms fail to accurately predict and process self-generated touch. If an impaired prediction underlies the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, then a similar impairment should exist in healthy nonclinical individuals with high positive schizotypal traits. One hundred healthy participants (53 female), assessed for schizotypal traits, underwent a well-established psychophysics force discrimination task to quantify how they perceived self-generated and externally generated touch. The perceived intensity of tactile stimuli delivered to their left index finger (magnitude) and the ability to discriminate the stimuli (precision) was measured. We observed that higher positive schizotypal traits were associated with reduced somatosensory attenuation and poorer somatosensory precision of self-generated touch, both when treating schizotypy as a continuous or categorical variable. These effects were specific to positive schizotypy and were not observed for the negative or disorganized dimensions of schizotypy. The results suggest that positive schizotypal traits are associated with a reduced ability to predict and process self-generated touch. Given that the positive dimension of schizotypy represents the analogue of positive psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia, deficits in processing self-generated tactile information could indicate increased liability to schizophrenia.

Clinical Manifestations of Body Memories: The Impact of Past Bodily Experiences on Mental Health.

Bodily experiences such as the feeling of touch, pain or inner signals of the body are deeply emotional and activate brain networks that mediate their perception and higher-order processing. While the ad hoc perception of bodily signals and their influence on behavior is empirically well studied, there is a knowledge gap on how we store and retrieve bodily experiences that we perceived in the past, and how this influences our everyday life. Here, we explore the hypothesis that negative body memories, that is, negative bodily experiences of the past that are stored in memory and influence behavior, contribute to the development of somatic manifestations of mental health problems including somatic symptoms, traumatic re-experiences or dissociative symptoms. By combining knowledge from the areas of cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuroscience with insights from psychotherapy, we identify Clinical Body Memory (CBM) mechanisms that specify how mental health problems could be driven by corporeal experiences stored in memory. The major argument is that the investigation of the neuronal mechanisms that underlie the storage and retrieval of body memories provides us with empirical access to reduce the negative impact of body memories on mental health.

Comfort fitting shape memory elastomer with constructed strong interface based on amphiphilic hybrid Janus particles

Comfort fitting shape memory elastomer exhibits various potential application in flexible wearable and biomedical devices, which can be developed by mixing the comfort fitting elastomer with the materials of reversible transition. However, it's very difficult to obtain the soft touching feeling, high elongation, and excellent shape memory property at the same time, and the key point mainly depends on improving interface stability and adjusting the morphology by the compatibilizer . In the work, silicone elastomer with excellent shape memory property was obtained by developing an amphiphilic PCL-JP-PDMS hybrid Janus particles compatibilizer for methyl vinyl silicone elastomer/polycaprolactone (MVQ/PCL) blend. Only through increasing the PDMS grafting ratio on the PCL-JP-PDMS particles compatibilizer, the morphology of PCL dispersed phase changed from short fibrous to similar spherical, which ensured the comfort feeling (E = 5.9 MPa), high fixity (R f = 95%) and recovery ratio (R r = 99%) of shape memory MVQ/PCL blends. Furthermore, the shape memory silicone elastomer exhibited impressive elasticity in temporary shape at T = 25 °C, which is quite suitable for designing wearable device. Silicone elastomer with excellent shape memory property was obtained by developing an amphiphilic PCL-JP-PDMS hybrid Janus particles compatibilizer for MVQ/PCL blend, the amphiphilic PCL-JP-PDMS Janus particles were anchored at the interface of MVQ/PCL blends by the similar molecular chain entanglement and the stable conformation of asymmetric SiO 2 @PDVB particles. Much more importantly, the PCL-JP-PDMS particles with different PDMS grafting ratio were prepared as the compatibilizer, which made the interface adhesion and the property of MVQ/PCL blend be regulated by PDMS grafting ratio, which ensured the comfort feeling (E = 5.9 MPa), high fixity (R f = 95%) and recovery ratio (R r = 99%) of shape memory MVQ/PCL blends under the content of 3 wt % particles and 30 wt % PCL. Furthermore, the shape memory silicone elastomer exhibited impressive elasticity in temporary shape at T = 25 °C, which is quite suitable for designing wearable device.

Understanding the Effect of Speed on Human Emotion Perception in Mediated Social Touch Using Voice Coil Actuators

Touch as a modality in social communication has been getting more attention with recent developments in wearable technology and an increase in awareness of how limited physical contact can lead to touch starvation and feelings of depression. Although several mediated touch methods have been developed for conveying emotional support, the transfer of emotion through mediated touch has not been widely studied. This work addresses this need by exploring emotional communication through a novel wearable haptic system. The system records physical touch patterns through an array of force sensors, processes the recordings using novel gesture-based algorithms to create actuator control signals, and generates mediated social touch through an array of voice coil actuators. We conducted a human subject study (N= 20) to understand the perception and emotional components of this mediated social touch for common social touch gestures, including poking, patting, massaging, squeezing, and stroking. Our results show that the speed of the virtual gesture significantly alters the participants' ratings of valence, arousal, realism, and comfort of these gestures with increased speed producing negative emotions and decreased realism. The findings from the study will allow us to better recognize generic patterns from human mediated touch perception and determine how mediated social touch can be used to convey emotion. Our system design, signal processing methods, and results can provide guidance in future mediated social touch design.

Trans in Retrospect

Trans in Retrospect

Study on evaluation of sensor characteristics of Robotic finger system for prostate palpation

Palpation is a diagnosis method with touch feeling. The diagnosis by palpation is subjective, and the accuracy of diagnosis depends on the physician's experience and skill. Therefore, there is a need for a sensor system that performs palpation more objectively and automatically. In this study, we developed a palpation sensor system using a robotic finger that imitates a doctor's finger, targeting the prostate gland. In this study, a robotic finger was used to push a spherical indenter at the tip of the finger into a palpable object, and the hardness was estimated from the amount of pushing and the contact force. As a result, it was confirmed that it is possible to estimate the difference in Young's modulus of samples of different hardness, which are objects to be palpated.

Analysis of electrical and comfort properties of conductive knitted fabrics based on blending ratio of silver-coated yarns for smart clothing

In this study, the relationship between the functionality and comfort of conductive fabrics for smart clothing is investigated by examining changes in the mechanical, electrical, and comfort properties of knitted fabrics based on the blending ratio of conductive yarns. Hence, flat knitted fabrics of the same structure are manufactured using polyester and silver-coated polyamide yarns. Subsequently, their weight, thickness, tensile strength, tensile strain, bending rigidity, breathability, surface properties are measured, and their cool touch feeling, surface resistance, and electrical heating performance are evaluated. Because the strength and specific gravity of a silver-coated conductive yarn are high, with an increase in its blending ratio, its weight, tensile strength, and bending rigidity increase, whereas its strain decreases. In terms of the comfort properties, the air permeability increases as the blending ratio of the conductive yarn increases, because the pores on the surface of the knitted fabric are increased structurally owing to the conductive yarns. However, the water vapor transmission rate remains unchanged. Meanwhile, the surface roughness does not change significantly in the wale direction; however, it increases in the course direction as the blending ratio of the conductive yarn increases. The recoverability from compression decreases, and the work of compression increases as the blending ratio of the conductive yarn increases. This implies that the conductive fabric can be compressed easily but is less likely to recover from compression. Changes in the surface roughness and compression property show that the hand value of the knitted fabric is altered by the insertion of the conductive yarn. The electrical properties improved by increasing the blending ratio of the conductive yarns. In particular, even with only 33% insertion of conductive yarns, extremely good electrical properties are obtained, that is, low resistance, sensitive resistance change due to stretching, and heating of 48°C. Therefore, blending conventional and conductive yarns instead of using only conductive yarns improve comfort and wearability when applying conductive knitted fabrics to smart clothing.

Evaluation Structure Model Leading to Want to Touch Feelings for Solid of Revolution by Rotating a Curve

Evaluation Structure Model Leading to Want to Touch Feelings for Solid of Revolution by Rotating a Curve