New wearable device stimulates skin
Summary
Although it lends itself well to gaming and virtual reality (VR), the researchers anticipate that there may be applications in healthcare, to help those who are visually impaired in ‘feeling’ their environment, or provide feedback to people with prosthetic limbs. An additional version allows the same actuators to provide a gentle twisting motion at the surface of the skin to complement the ability to deliver vertical force, adding realism to the sensations.” Rogers co-led the work with Northwestern’s Yonggang Huang, the Jan and Marcia Achenbach Professorship in Mechanical Engineering at McCormick; Hanqing Jiang of Westlake University in China; and Zhaoqian Xie of Dalian University of Technology in China. By using Bluetooth technology in a smartphone, the device can receive data about a person’s surroundings for translation into tactile feedback - where one sensation, like vision, is substituted for another, like touch. To find the optimal design, Huang’s team conducted systematic computational modelling in which they examined how the device interacts with skin through electromagnetic actuation. “As one of several application examples, we show that this system can support a basic version of ‘vision’ in the form of haptic patterns delivered to the surface of the skin based on data collected using the 3D imaging function (LiDAR) available on smartphones,” Rogers concluded.