We humans use the five senses of “sight, sound, touch, taste and smell,” to interact with other people and various objects around us. While remote communication with video and speech have become familiar to us lately, DoCoMo is currently working on research aiming at finding ways to communicate via tactile sensation, which is believed to be important in terms of information volume, which comes ...

objectives: the aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of olfaction, audition and tactile senses in mobility and orientation of blinds. methods: the statistical sample of this research included 100 blind persons aged between 16 and 75 years (61 males and 39 females) with different level of education (16 persons lower than the diploma, 26 persons diploma, 46 persons bachelor, 12 person ma)...

Four normally-hearing subjects were trained and tested with all combinations of a highly-degraded auditory input, a visual input via lipreading, and a tactile input using a multichannel electrotactile speech processor. The speech perception of the subjects was assessed with closed sets of vowels, consonants, and multisyllabic words; with open sets of words and sentences, and with speech trackin...

Subjects were presented with pairs of tactile drifting sinusoids and made speed discrimination judgments. On some trials, a visual drifting sinusoid, which subjects were instructed to ignore, was presented simultaneously with one of the two tactile stimuli. When the visual and tactile gratings drifted in the same direction (i.e., from left to right), the visual distractors were found to increas...

Tactile sensing is a fundamental component of object manipulation and tool handling skills. With robots entering unstructured environments, tactile feedback also becomes an important ability for robot manipulation and use of tools. In this work, we explore how a robot can learn to use tactile sensing in object manipulation tasks. We first address the problem of in-hand object localization and a...

The overall goal of this chapter is to give the reader insights into the human factors issues related to the use of tactile displays. Torso-mounted displays, which are particularly suited for direction and orientation cues, are emphasized. First, perceptual issues relevant to tactile stimulation are discussed. These include issues regarding spatial acuity and absolute localization of tactile cu...

The present study makes two contributions to the literature on tactile feedback. First, it investigates the effect of tactile feedback in isometric rate control devices. The use of tactile feedback in this type of device has not been systematically investigated. An isometric joystick, such as the IBM TrackpointTM in-keyboard pointing device does not perceptibly move and is operated by force. Ca...

Tactile perception is inhibited during movement execution, a phenomenon known as tactile suppression. Here, we investigated whether the type of movement determines whether or not this form of sensory suppression occurs. Participants performed simple reaching or exploratory movements. Tactile discrimination thresholds were calculated for vibratory stimuli delivered to participants' wrists while ...

Somaesthetic, motor and cognitive functions were studied in a man with impaired tactile object-recognition (TOR) in his left hand due to a right parietal convexity meningeoma which had been surgically removed. Primary motor and somatosensory functions were not impaired, and discriminative abilities for various tactile aspects and cognitive skills were preserved. Nevertheless, the patient could ...

Considering tactile sensation when designing products is important because the decision to purchase often depends on how products feel. Numerous psychophysical studies have attempted to identify important factors that describe tactile perceptions. However, the numbers and types of major tactile dimensions reported in previous studies have varied because of differences in materials used across e...