Polarity Effect in Electrovibration for Tactile Display

Electrovibration is the tactile sensation of an alternating potential between the human body and a smooth conducting surface when the skin slides over the surface and where the current is too small to stimulate sensory nerves directly. It has been proposed as a high-density tactile display method, f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering 2006-10, Vol.53 (10), p.2047-2054
Main Authors: Kaczmarek, K.A., Nammi, K., Agarwal, A.K., Tyler, M.E., Haase, S.J., Beebe, D.J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological system modeling
Biomedical engineering
Displays
Electric Stimulation - instrumentation
Electric Stimulation - methods
Electrodes
Electrostatics
Electrovibration
Equipment Design
Equipment Failure Analysis
Fingers - physiology
Force sensors
Frequency
haptic
Humans
Orthopedic surgery
polarity
sensation
Sensory Thresholds - physiology
Skin
Skin - innervation
Skin Physiological Phenomena
tactile display
Touch - physiology
Transducers
User-Computer Interface
Vibration
waveform
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Summary:Electrovibration is the tactile sensation of an alternating potential between the human body and a smooth conducting surface when the skin slides over the surface and where the current is too small to stimulate sensory nerves directly. It has been proposed as a high-density tactile display method, for example to display pictographic information to persons who are blind. Previous models for the electrovibration transduction mechanism are based on a parallel-plate capacitor in which the electrostatic force is insensitive to polarity. We present experimental data showing that electrovibratory perceptual sensitivity to positive pulses is less than that for negative or biphasic pulses and propose that this disparity may be due to the asymmetric electrical properties of human skin. We furthermore propose using negative pulses for insulated tactile displays based on electrovibration because their sensory thresholds were found to be more stable than for waveforms incorporating positive pulses
ISSN:0018-9294
1558-2531
DOI:10.1109/TBME.2006.881804