A Review of Smart Materials in Tactile Actuators for Information Delivery

As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of objects, like weight, temperature, textures, and motion, etc. In fact, those properties are nerve stimuli to our brain received by different kinds of receptors in the skin. Mechanical, electrical, and thermal stimuli can stimulate these receptors and cause different information to be conveyed through the nerves. Technologies for actuators to provide mechanical, electrical or thermal stimuli have been developed. These include static or vibrational actuation, electrostatic stimulation, focused ultrasound, and more. Smart materials, such as piezoelectric materials, carbon nanotubes, and shape memory alloys, play important roles in providing actuation for tactile sensation. This paper aims to review the background biological knowledge of human tactile sensing, to give an understanding of how we sense and interact with the world through the sense of touch, as well as the conventional and state-of-the-art technologies of tactile actuators for tactile feedback delivery

Teaching Learners with Visual Impairment

This book, Teaching Learners with Visual Impairment, focuses on holistic support to learners with visual impairment in and beyond the classroom and school context. Special attention is given to classroom practice, learning support, curriculum differentiation and assessment practices, to mention but a few areas of focus covered in the book. In this manner, this book makes a significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge on the implementation of inclusive education policy with learners affected by visual impairment

Electrotactile feedback applications for hand and arm interactions: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and future directions

Haptic feedback is critical in a broad range of human-machine/computer-interaction applications. However, the high cost and low portability/wearability of haptic devices remain unresolved issues, severely limiting the adoption of this otherwise promising technology. Electrotactile interfaces have the advantage of being more portable and wearable due to their reduced actuators' size, as well as their lower power consumption and manufacturing cost. The applications of electrotactile feedback have been explored in human-computer interaction and human-machine-interaction for facilitating hand-based interactions in applications such as prosthetics, virtual reality, robotic teleoperation, surface haptics, portable devices, and rehabilitation. This paper presents a technological overview of electrotactile feedback, as well a systematic review and meta-analysis of its applications for hand-based interactions. We discuss the different electrotactile systems according to the type of application. We also discuss over a quantitative congregation of the findings, to offer a high-level overview into the state-of-art and suggest future directions. Electrotactile feedback systems showed increased portability/wearability, and they were successful in rendering and/or augmenting most tactile sensations, eliciting perceptual processes, and improving performance in many scenarios. However, knowledge gaps (e.g., embodiment), technical (e.g., recurrent calibration, electrodes' durability) and methodological (e.g., sample size) drawbacks were detected, which should be addressed in future studies.Comment: 18 pages, 1 table, 8 figures, under review in Transactions on Haptics. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.Upon acceptance of the article by IEEE, the preprint article will be replaced with the accepted versio

Adaptive and Assistive Technology for Libraries

The concept of adaptive and assistive technology is not a new one. Historically, print-enlarging devices like eyeglasses were probably a first step in the direction of assistive technology in connection with books and libraries. It is not a coincidence that eyeglasses remained extremely rare from their invention around the year 1000 as privileges of the wealthy until the invention of the printing press when they filtered down to a larger number of people. Fast-forward 1000 years from the first eyeglasses to contact lenses, a fraction of the size, a fraction of the weight. Still, they had only one use: to assist vision. Many of the new assistive and adaptive technologies are combinations of technologies addressing not only one disability like vision or hearing, but several. Instead of mechanical aids, they are now combinations of mechanical and electronic aids. One single machine like a computer running Windows XP can aid the vision impaired by magnification or Braille, the hearing impaired by amplified headsets and visual cues instead of aural cues, the mobility impaired by alternative input devices like trackballs or joysticks, and the learning disabled by having text read aloud through Optical Character Recognition. One of the best, simplest and cheapest pieces of assistive and adaptive equipment in libraries today is the screen-enlarging software. ZoomText is one of these, but there are many different companies that make similar products. They are all easy to use, have good tech support, and are upgraded regularly (Mates 2004). Text may be magnified up to 32x, colors can be adapted, font size can be adjusted, and a different cursor may be chosen. Price range for this technology is $500 to$700

Teaching Learners with Visual Impairment

This book, Teaching Learners with Visual Impairment, focuses on holistic support to learners with visual impairment in and beyond the classroom and school context. Special attention is given to classroom practice, learning support, curriculum differentiation and assessment practices, to mention but a few areas of focus covered in the book. In this manner, this book makes a significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge on the implementation of inclusive education policy with learners affected by visual impairment

HandSight: A Touch-Based Wearable System to Increase Information Accessibility for People with Visual Impairments

Many activities of daily living such as getting dressed, preparing food, wayfinding, or shopping rely heavily on visual information, and the inability to access that information can negatively impact the quality of life for people with vision impairments. While numerous researchers have explored solutions for assisting with visual tasks that can be performed at a distance, such as identifying landmarks for navigation or recognizing people and objects, few have attempted to provide access to nearby visual information through touch. Touch is a highly attuned means of acquiring tactile and spatial information, especially for people with vision impairments. By supporting touch-based access to information, we may help users to better understand how a surface appears (e.g., document layout, clothing patterns), thereby improving the quality of life. To address this gap in research, this dissertation explores methods to augment a visually impaired user’s sense of touch with interactive, real-time computer vision to access information about the physical world. These explorations span three application areas: reading and exploring printed documents, controlling mobile devices, and identifying colors and visual textures. At the core of each application is a system called HandSight that uses wearable cameras and other sensors to detect touch events and identify surface content beneath the user’s finger. To create HandSight, we designed and implemented the physical hardware, developed signal processing and computer vision algorithms, and designed real-time feedback that enables users to interpret visual or digital content. We involve visually impaired users throughout the design and development process, conducting several user studies to assess usability and robustness and to improve our prototype designs. The contributions of this dissertation include: (i) developing and iteratively refining HandSight, a novel wearable system to assist visually impaired users in their daily lives; (ii) evaluating HandSight across a diverse set of tasks, and identifying tradeoffs of a finger-worn approach in terms of physical design, algorithmic complexity and robustness, and usability; and (iii) identifying broader design implications for future wearable systems and for the fields of accessibility, computer vision, augmented and virtual reality, and human-computer interaction

Rehabilitation Engineering

Population ageing has major consequences and implications in all areas of our daily life as well as other important aspects, such as economic growth, savings, investment and consumption, labour markets, pensions, property and care from one generation to another. Additionally, health and related care, family composition and life-style, housing and migration are also affected. Given the rapid increase in the aging of the population and the further increase that is expected in the coming years, an important problem that has to be faced is the corresponding increase in chronic illness, disabilities, and loss of functional independence endemic to the elderly (WHO 2008). For this reason, novel methods of rehabilitation and care management are urgently needed. This book covers many rehabilitation support systems and robots developed for upper limbs, lower limbs as well as visually impaired condition. Other than upper limbs, the lower limb research works are also discussed like motorized foot rest for electric powered wheelchair and standing assistance device