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

A Magnetic Localization Technique Designed for use with Magnetic Levitation Systems.

M.S. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information

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

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

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

Sistemas interativos tangíveis e processos de mediação tecnológica: hipóteses sobre agência, significação e cognição a partir da investigação do MIT Tangible Media Group

A presente dissertação toma a investigação em sistemas de interação tangível do MIT Tangible Media Group como objeto, a pretexto da sua inclusão na edição de 2016 do Festival Ars Electronica, sob o tema Radical Atoms: The Alchemists of Our Time. Pretende-se compreender quais os pontos de contato da investigação do grupo com os estudos dos media, de forma a localizar a sua relevância para a programação do festival. O enquadramento nos estudos dos media é feito pela localização de um conjunto de termos-chave no trabalho do grupo, os quais evocam questões afetas à fenomenologia, filosofia da tecnologia e mediação tecnológica. Conclui-se que estes sistemas de interação tangível ativam processos particulares de constituição de agência, significação e cognição. Na ausência de outros materiais que explorem estas relações no contexto do festival, a dissertação apresenta-se assim como complemento à leitura do tema Radical Atoms: The Alchemists of Our Time.This dissertation thesis takes the research of the MIT Tangible Media Group as its object, by occasion of its inclusion in the 2016 edition of Ars Electronica Festival under the theme Radical Atoms: The Alchemists of Our Time. The aim is to understand what are the common points between the group's research and media studies, in order to locate this object's relevance to the festival programming scope. The framing within media studies is done by surveying a set of keywords from the group's research, which evoke topics from phenomenology, philosophy of technology and technological mediation. It's concluded that these tangible interactive systems activate specific processes of agency, signification, and cognition. Given the lack of materials which explore these relationships within the context of the festival, the dissertation presents itself as a supplement to the reading of the Radical Atoms: The Alchemists of Our Time theme

The Hand-Held Force Magnifier: Surgical Tools to Augment the Sense of Touch

Modern surgeons routinely perform procedures with noisy, sub-threshold, or obscured visual and haptic feedback,either due to the necessary approach, or because the systems on which they are operating are exceeding delicate. For example, in cataract extraction, ophthalmic surgeons must peel away thin membranes in order to access and replace the lens of the eye. Elsewhere, dissection is now commonly performed with energy-delivering tools – rather than sharp blades – and damage to deep structures is possible if tissue contact is not well controlled. Surgeons compensate for their lack of tactile sensibility by relying solely on visual feedback, observing tissue deformation and other visual cues through surgical microscopes or cameras. Using visual information alone can make a procedure more difficult, because cognitive mediation is required to convert visual feedback into motor action. We call this the “haptic problem” in surgery because the human sensorimotor loop is deprived of critical tactile afferent information, increasing the chance for intraoperative injury and requiring extensive training before clinicians reach independent proficiency. Tools that enhance the surgeon’s direct perception of tool-tissue forces can therefore potentially reduce the risk of iatrogenic complications and improve patient outcomes. Towards this end, we have developed and characterized a new robotic surgical tool, the Hand-Held Force Magnifier (HHFM), which amplifies forces at the tool tip so they may be readily perceived by the user, a paradigm we call “in-situ” force feedback. In this dissertation, we describe the development of successive generations of HHFM prototypes, and the evaluation of a proposed human-in-the-loop control framework using the methods of psychophysics. Using these techniques, we have verified that our tool can reduce sensory perception thresholds, augmenting the user’s abilities beyond what is normally possible. Further, we have created models of human motor control in surgically relevant tasks such as membrane puncture, which have shown to be sensitive to push-pull direction and handedness effects. Force augmentation has also demonstrated improvements to force control in isometric force generation tasks. Finally, in support of future psychophysics work, we have developed an inexpensive, high-bandwidth, single axis haptic renderer using a commercial audio speaker

Three dimensional touch and vision for the micro-world

The ability to observe at tiny length scales has enabled key advances across the physical and life sciences. Much of what we know about the structure of cells and tissues comes from experiments on the micron length scale, enabled by new microscopy techniques. Modern manufacturing is increasingly concerned with materials that are structured on the nanometre scale, and devices which have ever-smaller features. Manipulating and measuring microscopic objects is a problem common to fields as diverse as microfabrication and cell biology, and it is these challenges that my doctoral studies have addressed. Tiny sizes mean tiny forces; so small that the light from a laser can be used to propel objects. Optical tweezers, a technique pioneered some two and a half decades ago, exploit light’s momentum to trap and manipulate objects. Now an established tool, single particles can be trapped and tracked to measure forces on a molecular scale, and this work is responsible for much of our current knowledge of motor proteins. This thesis describes advances in the holographic technology used to control multiple optical traps (and hence many trapped particles), and improved methods for monitoring the positions and forces involved. The speed with which multiple holographic optical traps can be moved has traditionally been limited by the time taken to calculate holograms, but by using consumer graphics cards and high speed Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) I have implemented holographic systems fast enough to react to the Brownian motion of trapped particles. Brownian motion can, to some extent, be suppressed by this approach, and it also allows the trap's stiffness to be engineered to balance sensitivity against tight constraint of position. Feedback control using an SLM, rather than the other beam steering technologies that have been employed, is able to react to motion in three dimensions. This requires 3D position measurement, which is provided by the stereo microscopy technique described in Chapter 2. By illuminating and viewing the sample from two different angles it is possible to reconstruct the depth of objects. This is accomplished through a single high numerical aperture microscope objective, the same lens used to focus the trapping laser. In conjunction with a fast CMOS camera, it is possible to track particles with an accuracy of 2-3nm at several thousand frames per second. This allows measurement of forces and displacements within the control loop, that can be fed back to influence the position of the optical traps. This force information can also be relayed to the operator using a force-feedback joystick as detailed in Chapter 7. Interface design is an important part of making technology accessible to scientists from other disciplines; to this end I have also developed a multi-touch tablet application to control optical tweezers. By creating simple, reliable systems and coupling them to an intuitive interface, I have endeavoured to produce developments which are of use to the non specialist as well as to experts in optical tweezers-a number of which are now available commercially (Section 8.7). These technologies form the basis of a toolkit for working with multi-part probes in optical tweezers, and they should bear fruit in the coming years as a new form of scanning-probe microscopy emerges

The feasibility of using virtual prototyping technologies for product evaluation

With the continuous development in computer and communications technology the use of computer aided design in design processes is becoming more commonplace. A wide range of virtual prototyping technologies are currently in development, some of which are commercially viable for use within a product design process. These virtual prototyping technologies range from graphics tablets to haptic devices. With the compression of design cycles the feasibility of using these technologies for product evaluation is becoming an ever more important consideration. This thesis begins by presenting the findings of a comprehensive literature review defining product design with a focus on product evaluation and a discussion of current virtual prototyping technologies. From the literature review it was clear that user involvement in the product evaluation process is critical. The literature review was followed by a series of interconnected studies starting with an investigation into design consultancies' access and use of prototyping technologies and their evaluation methods. Although design consultancies are already using photo-realistic renderings, animations and sometimes 3600 view CAD models for their virtual product evaluations, current virtual prototyping hardware and software is often unsatisfactory for their needs. Some emergent technologies such as haptic interfaces are currently not commonly used in industry. This study was followed by an investigation into users' psychological acceptance and physiological discomfort when using a variety of virtual prototyping tools for product evaluation compared with using physical prototypes, ranging from on-screen photo-realistic renderings to 3D 3600 view models developed using a range of design software. The third study then went on to explore the feasibility of using these virtual prototyping tools and the effect on product preference when compared to using physical prototypes. The forth study looked at the designer's requirements for current and future virtual prototyping tools, design tools and evaluation methods. In the final chapters of the thesis the relative strengths and weaknesses of these technologies were re-evaluated and a definitive set of user requirements based on the documentary evidence of the previous studies was produced. This was followed by the development of a speculative series of scenarios for the next generation of virtual prototyping technologies ranging from improvements to existing technologies through to blue sky concepts. These scenarios were then evaluated by designers and consumers to produce documentary evidence and recommendations for preferred and suitable combinations of virtual prototyping technologies. Such hardware and software will require a user interface that is intuitive, simple, easy to use and suitable for both the designers who create the virtual prototypes and the consumers who evaluate them