VIBES: Vibro-Inertial Bionic Enhancement System in a Prosthetic Socket

The use of vibrotactile feedback is of growing interest in the field of prosthetics, but few devices fully integrate this technology in the prosthesis to transmit high-frequency contact information (such as surface roughness and first contact) arising from the interaction of the prosthetic device with external items. This study describes a wearable vibrotactile system for high-frequency tactile information embedded in the prosthetic socket. The device consists of two compact planar vibrotactile actuators in direct contact with the user's skin to transmit tactile cues. These stimuli are directly related to the acceleration profiles recorded with two IMUS placed on the distal phalanx of a soft under-actuated robotic prosthesis (Soft-Hand Pro). We characterized the system from a psychophysical point of view with fifteen able-bodied participants by computing participants' Just Noticeable Difference (JND) related to the discrimination of vibrotactile cues delivered on the index finger, which are associated with the exploration of different sandpapers. Moreover, we performed a pilot experiment with one SoftHand Pro prosthesis user by designing a task, i.e. Active Texture Identification, to investigate if our feedback could enhance users' roughness discrimination. Results indicate that the device can effectively convey contact and texture cues, which users can readily detect and distinguish

Applications of Robotics for Autism Spectrum Disorder: a Scoping Review

Robotic therapies are receiving growing interest in the autism field, especially for the improvement of social skills of children, enhancing traditional human interventions. In this work, we conduct a scoping review of the literature in robotics for autism, providing the largest review on this field from the last five years. Our work underlines the need to better characterize participants and to increase the sample size. It is also important to develop homogeneous training protocols to analyse and compare the results. Nevertheless, 7 out of the 10 Randomized control trials reported a significant impact of robotic therapy. Overall, robot autonomy, adaptability and personalization as well as more standardized outcome measures were pointed as the most critical issues to address in future research