Visual Feedback Weakens the Augmentation of Perceived Stiffness by Artificial Skin Stretch

Abstract

Tactile stimulation devices are gaining popularity in haptic science and technology – they are lightweight, low-cost, can be easily made wearable, and do not suffer from instability during closed loop interactions with users. Applying tactile stimulation in the form of stretching the skin of the fingerpads, concurrently with kinesthetic force feedback, has been shown to augment the perceived stiffness during interactions with elastic objects. However, all of the studies to date have investigated the perceptual augmentation effects of artificial skin-stretch in the absence of visual feedback. We investigated how visual displacement feedback affects the augmentation of perceived stiffness caused by the skin-stretch. We used a forced-choice paradigm stiffness discrimination task with four different conditions: force feedback, force feedback with artificial skin-stretch, force and visual feedback, and force and visual feedback with artificial skin-stretch. We found that visual displacement feedback weakens the skin-stretch induced perceptual augmentation and improves the stiffness discrimination sensitivity.

Integrating Tactile Feedback Technologies Into Home-Based Telerehabilitation: Opportunities and Challenges in Light of COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Adding a skin stretch to force feedback has been shown to affect stiffness (Quek et al, 2013 , 2014a , b ; Schorr et al, 2013 ; Farajian et al, 2020a , b ) and friction (Sylvester and Provancher, 2007 ; Provancher and Sylvester, 2009 ) perception. In addition, concurrent tangential and normal skin deformation can be used to substitute and/or augment upper extremity force and torque feedback in navigation, tracking, insertion and palpation tasks (Quek et al, 2014b , 2015b ; Schorr et al, 2015 ; Pacchierotti et al, 2016 ; Clark et al, 2018 ), generating a high fidelity haptic feedback for the sensation of mass (Minamizawa et al, 2007 ; Kato et al, 2016 ) and virtual objects (Minamizawa et al, 2008 ).…”

Coevolution of internal representations in physical human-robot orchestration – models of the surgeon and the robot in robotic surgery

“…Despite progress in the design of systems with force feedback [14,15], their benefit to surgery is still debated [16,17]. Instead, the efforts of many groups have focused on using tactile stimulation instead of direct force feedback [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26], or on the automation of surgery [27,28,29]. However, the judgement of surgeons coupled with their fine manipulation abilities are crucial for the success of surgery.…”