A Wearable Hand Haptic Interface to Provide Skin Stretch Feedback to the Dorsum of a Hand

Abstract

This paper presents a glove type haptic interface that can provide cutaneous feedback to the dorsum of a user’s hand. The interface consists of flex sensors, a position tracker and skin stretch modules which provides cutaneous feedback to the hand. Global position of the wrist is tracked with the position tracker and the finger posture is estimated with the flex sensors. Two skin-stretch modules installed on the dorsum of the hand behind the MCP joint of the thumb, and the middle of the index and middle fingers. Whenever there is a contact between a fingertip and a virtual object, the skin-stretch module provides cutaneous feedback by rotating a contact element toward the wrist. The skin-stretch emulates the strain of the skin occurring when a finger is pushed away by touching a real object.