CHS: Small: ETouch - Amplifying the Sense of Touch

CHS：小：ETouch - 增强触觉

• 批准号: 1623459
• 负责人: Yon Visell
• 金额: $ 49.97万
• 依托单位: University of California-Santa Barbara
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-09-01 至 2019-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1623459&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CHS; Small; ETouch; Amplifying; Sense

Despite advances in haptic (touch) technologies, current interactive systems make limited use of the sensorimotor capabilities of the human body. Not surprisingly, then, the enhancement of intrinsic touch sensation has received little prior attention. The PI's overarching goal in this research is to create knowledge and technology for tactile sensing and feedback, in order to realize a glove that enhances touch perception by electronically amplifying tactile sensations, thereby greatly extending the limits of normal human haptic perception. This will enable its wearer to feel objects with heightened sensitivity, and to discern fine levels of detail in surfaces, objects, or tissues. Project outcomes will include enabling technologies for hand-worn instruments that can amplify touch much like a hearing aid is able to amplify sound, or a digital microscope can magnify images. The wearer of such a device will be able to feel defects in surfaces that would not normally be detected, to detect lumps that would otherwise go unnoticed, and to perform fine manipulation tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Thus, the project holds the potential to impact a wide range of human activities and industries, many of which depend upon manual interaction and inspection. As part of the current project, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Department of Neurology, the PI will develop new methods for sensory assessment and guidelines for tactile enhancement with broad implications for clinical applications to the rehabilitation of touch deficits caused by disease or injury affecting the somatosensory system. Further applications in sensory feedback for upper-limb prosthetics and rehabilitation are envisioned to be directly facilitated by knowledge generated in this way. This project will pioneer new methods for electronic sensing of the mechanical stimuli underlying touch sensations in the hand, for computational enhancement of perceptually relevant haptic features, and for reproducing touch sensations via distributed actuators of a wearable, glove-like electronic interface, by integrating work in tactile sensing, computational analysis, distributed actuation and control, and real-time touch amplification. The PI will design and fabricate new soft computing technologies for capturing, processing, and reproducing touch sensations felt with the hand, in the form of strain and vibration signatures of skin-object contact. Challenges to realizing such a vision include: the multiple time and length scales involved; the complexity of the mechanical stimuli, which consist of complex, movement-dependent distributed strain in the skin; limitations in current knowledge about the fundamental computations underlying sensory processing, which obscure the relevant signal features; and the difficulty of electronically reproducing distributed touch sensations during whole-hand haptic interaction. The work will contribute to advances in each of these areas, first by designing and fabricating new sensor and actuator technologies, and then by using these to reveal how touch sensation is elicited through contact generated mechanical signals, and how these sensations are processed by the perceptual system.

尽管在触觉（触摸）技术的进步，目前的交互式系统利用有限的人体的感觉运动能力。 因此，不奇怪的是，增强内在的触觉几乎没有得到事先的关注。 PI在这项研究中的首要目标是创造触觉传感和反馈的知识和技术，以实现通过电子放大触觉来增强触觉感知的手套，从而大大扩展正常人类触觉感知的极限。 这将使其佩戴者能够以更高的灵敏度感受物体，并在表面，物体或组织中辨别细节。 项目成果将包括使手持仪器能够放大触摸的技术，就像助听器能够放大声音一样，或者数字显微镜可以放大图像。 这种设备的佩戴者将能够感觉到通常不会被检测到的表面缺陷，检测否则会被忽视的肿块，并执行否则不可能的精细操作任务。 因此，该项目有可能影响广泛的人类活动和行业，其中许多依赖于人工交互和检查。 作为当前项目的一部分，与宾夕法尼亚大学医学院神经病学系合作，PI将开发新的感觉评估方法和触觉增强指南，对影响躯体感觉系统的疾病或损伤引起的触觉缺陷的康复具有广泛的临床应用意义。 上肢假肢和康复的感觉反馈的进一步应用被设想为直接促进以这种方式产生的知识。 该项目将开创新的方法，用于电子传感的机械刺激下的触摸感觉在手中，用于计算增强感知相关的触觉功能，并通过分布式致动器的可穿戴，手套状的电子接口再现触摸感觉，通过集成工作在触觉传感，计算分析，分布式驱动和控制，和实时触摸放大。 PI将设计和制造新的软计算技术，用于捕获，处理和再现手部感觉到的触觉，以皮肤与物体接触的应变和振动特征的形式。实现这样的愿景所面临的挑战包括：涉及多个时间和长度尺度;机械刺激的复杂性，其中包括皮肤中复杂的、依赖于运动的分布式应变;当前有关感觉处理基础计算的知识存在局限性，这掩盖了相关的信号特征;以及在全手触觉交互期间以电子方式再现分布式触摸感觉的困难。 这项工作将有助于这些领域的进步，首先是通过设计和制造新的传感器和致动器技术，然后通过使用这些技术来揭示触摸感觉是如何通过接触产生的机械信号引起的，以及这些感觉是如何被感知系统处理的。