Design and Evaluation of a Wearable Skin Stretch Device for Haptic Guidance

We present a wearable skin stretch device for the forearm. It is composed of four cylindrical end effectors, evenly distributed around the user's forearm. They can generate independent skin stretch stimuli at the palmar, dorsal, ulnar, and radial sides of the arm. When the four end effectors rotate in the same direction, the wearable device provides cutaneous stimuli about a desired pronation/supination of the forearm. On the other hand, when two opposite end effectors rotate in different directions, the cutaneous device provides cutaneous stimuli about a desired translation of the forearm. To evaluate the effectiveness of our device in providing navigation information, we carried out two experiments of haptic navigation. In the first one, subjects were asked to translate and rotate the forearm toward a target position and orientation, respectively. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to control a 6-DoF robotic manipulator to grasp and lift a target object. Haptic feedback provided by our wearable device improved the performance of both experiments with respect to providing no haptic feedback. Moreover, it showed similar performance with respect to sensory substitution via visual feedback, without overloading the visual channel.