Unlike the other senses, the sense of touch is not localized to a specific region of the body; instead, it is distributed across the entire body through the touch sensory organ; our skin. Even though the presence and distribution of mechanoreceptors differ in hairy and non-hairy skin (perception from the skin at the wrist is poorer than at the fingertip), it is still possible to use the forearm or the wrist to mount the wearable haptic devices, taking advantage of unused skin location.

Our motivation is to create wearable haptic devices to interact with the user’s arm or wrist to deliver real-time feedback corresponding to (1) the virtual interactions in the Extended Reality environments or (2) the real interactions in a remote operational setting. Our activities evolve around designing such wearable haptic and sensory systems and using them for applications based on training, manipulation, or interaction.

To create robotic devices for human-computer interaction for information transfer or virtual manipulation tasks, we first need to understand the limitations of human perception and the sense of touch. Additionally, these limitations might be directly related to the actuation or sensing technologies that we desire to choose.

Especially when it comes to relocating the haptic feedback, we should characterize the haptic perception as a comparative study to conventional methods of haptic technology. This objective primarily focuses on the differences between skin types (hairy vs. glabrous skin): experiments will be designed to determine the multi-modal and distributed feedback that will maximize information transfer and communication rate, while also considering user capabilities.