Providing Proprioceptive Feedback Via A Simultaneous Skin Stretch And Vibrotactile Haptic Display

Abstract

This paper presents the development and testing of a non-invasive haptic display that will provide proprioceptive information to a user about the location of the prosthetic device. This is accomplished using a previously designed skin stretch display combined with a vibrotactile display to communicate the location of the imaginary target. In this paper, the haptic display was studied to determine how much the cutaneous feedback improves the accuracy of finding a target location when no visual cues are available. The haptic display was controlled using a potentiometer, where the dial input would be mapped directly to the haptic display output. The accuracy was tested by providing random target locations for participants to navigate the potentiometer to, and the participants tried to accurately find those locations under four feedback conditions: no feedback from the display, skin stretch only feedback, vibration only feedback, and skin stretch and vibration feedback simultaneously. The expected outcome was that the absolute error in accuracy would be less when using the skin stretch and vibration feedback combined compared to navigating without it or with the feedback individually. Future research would include integrating the haptic display with a prosthetic device, and eventually developing an array of skin stretch displays to enable communication of multiple degrees of freedom.