Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review and perspectives

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand

Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display

Tactile displays are now becoming available in a form that can be easily used in a user interface. This paper describes a new form of tactile output. Tactons, or tactile icons, are structured, abstract messages that can be used to communicate messages non-visually. A range of different parameters can be used for Tacton construction including: frequency, amplitude and duration of a tactile pulse, plus other parameters such as rhythm and location. Tactons have the potential to improve interaction in a range of different areas, particularly where the visual display is overloaded, limited in size or not available, such as interfaces for blind people or in mobile and wearable devices. This paper describes Tactons, the parameters used to construct them and some possible ways to design them. Examples of where Tactons might prove useful in user interfaces are given

Prevalence of haptic feedback in robot-mediated surgery : a systematic review of literature

© 2017 Springer-Verlag. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Robotic Surgery. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11701-017-0763-4With the successful uptake and inclusion of robotic systems in minimally invasive surgery and with the increasing application of robotic surgery (RS) in numerous surgical specialities worldwide, there is now a need to develop and enhance the technology further. One such improvement is the implementation and amalgamation of haptic feedback technology into RS which will permit the operating surgeon on the console to receive haptic information on the type of tissue being operated on. The main advantage of using this is to allow the operating surgeon to feel and control the amount of force applied to different tissues during surgery thus minimising the risk of tissue damage due to both the direct and indirect effects of excessive tissue force or tension being applied during RS. We performed a two-rater systematic review to identify the latest developments and potential avenues of improving technology in the application and implementation of haptic feedback technology to the operating surgeon on the console during RS. This review provides a summary of technological enhancements in RS, considering different stages of work, from proof of concept to cadaver tissue testing, surgery in animals, and finally real implementation in surgical practice. We identify that at the time of this review, while there is a unanimous agreement regarding need for haptic and tactile feedback, there are no solutions or products available that address this need. There is a scope and need for new developments in haptic augmentation for robot-mediated surgery with the aim of improving patient care and robotic surgical technology further.Peer reviewe

Design of a wearable fingertip haptic device for remote palpation: Characterisation and interface with a virtual environment

© 2018 Tzemanaki, Al, Melhuish and Dogramadzi. This paper presents the development of a wearable Fingertip Haptic Device (FHD) that can provide cutaneous feedback via a Variable Compliance Platform (VCP). The FHD includes an inertial measurement unit, which tracks the motion of the user's finger while its haptic functionality relies on two parameters: pressure in the VCP and its linear displacement towards the fingertip. The combination of these two features results in various conditions of the FHD, which emulate the remote object or surface stiffness properties. Such a device can be used in tele-operation, including virtual reality applications, where rendering the level of stiffness of different physical or virtual materials could provide a more realistic haptic perception to the user. The FHD stiffness representation is characterised in terms of resulting pressure and force applied to the fingertip created through the relationship of the two functional parameters - pressure and displacement of the VCP. The FHD was tested in a series of user studies to assess its potential to create a user perception of the object's variable stiffness. The viability of the FHD as a haptic device has been further confirmed by interfacing the users with a virtual environment. The developed virtual environment task required the users to follow a virtual path, identify objects of different hardness on the path and navigate away from "no-go" zones. The task was performed with and without the use of the variable compliance on the FHD. The results showed improved performance with the presence of the variable compliance provided by the FHD in all assessed categories and particularly in the ability to identify correctly between objects of different hardness

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility

손끝 햅틱 장비를 위한 의사 햅틱의 활용

학위논문 (석사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 기계항공공학부, 2016. 2. 이동준.We propose a novel design of cutaneous fingertip haptic device and approach of integrating pseudo-haptics into our cutaneous haptic device. With 2-DoF cutaneous device, angle-force calibration result is presented for its operation. Then, 3-DoF cutaneous haptic device is designed for more realistic contact feedback in virtual reality (VR). Preliminary result of integrating cutaneous device and hand tracking device for complete wearable haptic interface is also demonstrated. Meanwhile, we explore possible utility of pseudo-haptics for cutaneous fingertip haptic device, whose performance is inherently limited due to the lack of kinesthetic feedback. We experimentally demonstrate that: 1) pseudo-haptics can render virtual stiffness to be more rigid or softer only by modulating visual cueand 2) pseudo-haptics can be used to expand the range of the perceived virtual stiffness to be doubled.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation and Objectives 1 1.2 Related Works 3 Chapter 2 Cutaneous Fingertip Haptic Device 6 2.1 2-DoF Cutaneous Haptic Device 6 2.1.1 Design and Specification 6 2.1.2 Angle-Force Calibration 8 2.1.3 Application of 2-DoF Cutaneous Haptic Device 10 2.2 3-DoF Cutaneous Haptic Device 11 2.2.1 Design and Specification 11 2.2.2 Control Design 14 2.2.3 IMU Distortion Offset Calibration 17 2.2.4 Device Validation 20 2.2.5 Integration with Wearable Hand Tracking Interface 21 Chapter 3 Pseudo-Haptics with Cutaneous Haptic Feedback 25 3.1 Limitation of Cutaneous Haptic Device 25 3.2 Application of Pseudo-Haptics Effect 26 Chapter 4 Experimental Study 28 4.1 Experimental Settings 28 4.2 Experiment #1 32 4.3 Experiment #2 34 4.4 Experiment #3 36 4.5 Discussion 38 Chapter 5 Conclusion and Future Work 40 5.1 Conclusion 40 5.2 Future Work 41 Bibliography 42 요약 50Maste

Cutaneous Force Feedback as a Sensory Subtraction Technique in Haptics

A novel sensory substitution technique is presented. Kinesthetic and cutaneous force feedback are substituted by cutaneous feedback (CF) only, provided by two wearable devices able to apply forces to the index finger and the thumb, while holding a handle during a teleoperation task. The force pattern, fed back to the user while using the cutaneous devices, is similar, in terms of intensity and area of application, to the cutaneous force pattern applied to the finger pad while interacting with a haptic device providing both cutaneous and kinesthetic force feedback. The pattern generated using the cutaneous devices can be thought as a subtraction between the complete haptic feedback (HF) and the kinesthetic part of it. For this reason, we refer to this approach as sensory subtraction instead of sensory substitution. A needle insertion scenario is considered to validate the approach. The haptic device is connected to a virtual environment simulating a needle insertion task. Experiments show that the perception of inserting a needle using the cutaneous-only force feedback is nearly indistinguishable from the one felt by the user while using both cutaneous and kinesthetic feedback. As most of the sensory substitution approaches, the proposed sensory subtraction technique also has the advantage of not suffering from stability issues of teleoperation systems due, for instance, to communication delays. Moreover, experiments show that the sensory subtraction technique outperforms sensory substitution with more conventional visual feedback (VF)