Tactile Stimulation Device

Personnel: Kevin Zheng, Dayi Bian

Goals/Objectives:

1. Design a tactile stimulation device which is able to produce affective touch and could be integrated with multisensory stimulation delivery system

Outline:

The sense of touch is widely known for the role it plays in discriminating and identifying external stimuli. However, there is growing evidence that the sense of touch has another dimension, also known as “affective touch,” which conveys social information just like what someone sees and hears. It is difficulty to produce skin-to-skin affective touch in laboratory settings, an analogous tactile stimulation which is produced by a mechanical source (e.g., soft brushing) is comparable to affective touch that is manually produced by hand. We designed an automated mechanism for affective touch to provide brush stroking with precise brush speed and pressure.

The brushing mechanism has two degrees of freedom, a horizontal motion to move the brush along the length of the forearm and a vertical motion to move the brush up and down to control contact pressure. Two stepper motors were selected to actuate the brush in both directions. The maximum speed of the horizontal movement is 13cm/s, which covers the most effective speed range to trigger affective touch. To achieve consistent brushing pressure and a smooth actuation of the lead screw, a fuzzy logic controller was implemented. The device is attached to an articulating arm which gives the infant a certain degree of freedom to move his/her arm while the relative position between the arm and the device remains the same.

Publications:

1. D. Bian, Z. Zheng, A. Swanson, A. Weitlauf, Z. Warren, and N. Sarkar, “Design of a Multisensory Stimulus Delivery System for Investigating Response Trajectories in Infancy,” International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, 2017.