Wearable Haptic Based Pattern Feedback Sleeve System

Anuradha Ranasinghe, Kaspar Althoefer, Prokar Dasgupta, Atulya Nagar, D. P. Thrishantha Nanayakkara

Abstract: This paper presents how humans trained in primitive haptic based patterns using a wearable sleeve, can recognize their scaling and shifting. The wearable sleeve consisted of 7 vibro-actuators to stimulate subjects arm to convey the primitive haptic based patterns. The focus of this study to understand (1) whether the human somatosensory system uses primitive patterns that can be modeled using Gaussian like functions to represent haptic perceptions, (2) whether these primitive representations are localized (cannot be shifted along the skin) and magnitude specific (cannot be scaled). These insights will help to develop more efficient haptic feedback systems using a small number of templates to be learnt to encode complex haptic messages.