Design of Electrocutaneous Tactile Display over Human Fingertip for Textural Applications in Space Manufacturing Feedback

Haptics philosophy and haptics technology has taken a huge turn in defining the science of human touch. A verity of actuators and tactile displays has emerged to create a real time touch through augmented environment. Human machine interaction (HMI) or Human computer interaction (HCI) has become a key technology for feedback systems from industrial applications to home automation. In creating such technologies, it is quite often to get introduced with new advanced actuators or displays like vibrotactile, electro-tactile, physical pins and combinational displays. In this paper, electro-tactile displays will be discussed due to its limited exposure over method of approach used in research. Electro-tactile or Electrocutaneous-tactile displays are monitored by applying electrical pulses over skin, by changing frequency and amplitude. In inception many studies have been conducted over flattened-electrodes which do not give maximum interaction possibilities over skin surface and sub-surface in detecting textural stimuli in one dimensional perspective. In this paper, the design of an electrode is studied using the human fingertip and ensures that the fmgertip achieves maximum contact points to trigger the skin receptors. The design is formulated by examining six human subjects or participants (25 years to 30 years). The key application behind the design is smart manufacturing feedback systems and space manufacturing feedback systems, where surface area and noise distortion plays a key role. The paper discusses the need of Electrocutaneous tactile displays in various applications based on the utilization of the surface area around the fmgertips. The study helps in achieving maximum surface points for contact using simple psychophysical or general physiology measurements. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.