Sensory systems for detecting tactile stimuli have evolved from touch-sensing nerves in invertebrates to complicated tactile end organs in mammals. Merkel discs are tactile end organs consisting of Merkel cells and Aβ-afferent nerve endings and are localized in fingertips, whisker hair follicles, and other touch-sensitive spots. Merkel discs transduce touch into slowly adapting impulses to enab...

This paper outlines a novel approach of displaying multifingered tactile feedback information from remote and virtual environments. Miniature tactile fingertip modules are developed allowing multi-fingered integration into an already existing hand force exoskeleton for display of combined tactile and kinesthetic feedback. The tactile feedback comprises generation of both, vibrotactile and therm...

Tactile speech aids, though extensively studied in the 1980s and 90s, never became a commercial success. A hypothesis to explain this failure might be that it is difficult to obtain true perceptual integration of a tactile signal with information from auditory speech: exploitation of tactile cues from a tactile aid might require cognitive effort and so prevent speech understanding at the high r...

Many studies have investigated the evidence for tactile and visual interactive responses to activation of various brain regions. However, few studies have reported on the effects of visuo-tactile multisensory integration on the amount of brain activation on the somatosensory cortical regions. The aim of this study was to examine whether coincidental information obtained by tactile stimulation c...

Tactile dots and bars serve as tactile landmarks so that people with visual impairment can use same consumer products as those used by sighted people. However, reliable age-related data on the appropriate sizes and the shapes was not necessarily available. The purpose of this study is to evaluate influences of edge radius of curvature of tactile dots and bars on their discriminability in younge...

To perceive the location of a tactile stimulus in external space (external tactile localisation), information about the location of the stimulus on the skin surface (tactile localisation on the skin) must be combined with proprioceptive information about the spatial location of body parts (position sense)--a process often referred to as 'tactile spatial remapping'. Recent research has revealed ...

BACKGROUND Robotic surgery has gained wide acceptance due to minimizing trauma in patients. However, the lack of tactile feedback is an essential limiting factor for the further expansion. In robotic surgery, feedback related to touch is currently kinesthetic, and it is mainly aimed at the minimization of force applied to tissues and organs. Design and implementation of diagnostic tactile feedb...

OBJECTIVE Magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were performed to investigate the cortical activation following tactile-on and tactile-off stimulation. METHODS We used a 306-ch whole-head MEG system and a tactile stimulator driven by a piezoelectric actuator. Tactile stimuli were applied to the tip of right index finger. The interstimulus interval was set at 2000 ms, which included a consta...

We propose a tentative tactile perception model called Simple Bundle Model and examine it by a tactile display based on ultrasonic radiation pressure. The ultrasonic tactile display reproduces high-resolution stress patterns with wide bandwidth on the skin. It is a multipurpose device for synthesizing high-fidelity tactile feeling, and useful to clarify the human tactile perception. The prototy...