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

Application of noncollapsing methods to the gene-based association test: A comparison study using Genetic Analysis Workshop 18 data

Rare variants have been proposed to play a significant role in the onset and development of common diseases. However, traditional analysis methods have difficulties in detecting association signals for rare causal variants because of a lack of statistical power. We propose a two-stage, gene-based method for association mapping of rare variants by applying four different noncollapsing algorithms. Using the Genome Analysis Workshop18 whole genome sequencing data set of simulated blood pressure phenotypes, we studied and contrasted the false-positive rate of each algorithm using receiver operating characteristic curves. The statistical power of these methods was also evaluated and compared through the analysis of 200 simulated replications in a smaller genotype data set. We showed that the Fisher's method was superior to the other 3 noncollapsing methods, but was no better than the standard method implemented with famSKAT. Further investigation is needed to explore the potential statistical properties of these approaches