Relationship between force sensation and stimulation parameters in tendon electrical stimulation

Abstract

Most haptic devices have the common problem of requiring a large hardware setup, because they must present actual force. To cope with this issue, we have proposed a method to present force sensation using tendon electrical stimulation. In this paper, we investigated whether it is possible to present force sensation by electrically stimulating the tendon through the skin surface at the wrist. We also investigated the relationship between the amount of sensation and the stimulation parameters. We found that a force sensation can be generated by electrical stimulation to the wrist, and the direction of the force sensation is opposite to the motion elicited by muscle electrical stimulation. We also found that it is possible to control the amount of the sensation by varying both pulse height and pulse frequency.