Comparison of skin stretch and vibrotactile stimulation for feedback of proprioceptive information,” in Haptic interfaces for virtual environment and teleoperator systems, 2008. haptics 2008. symposium on

We present the results of experiments to compare vibration and skin stretch in a virtual proprioception task in which subjects used a force sensor to control the movement of a virtual arm. Pilot ex-periments pointed to the need to provide the arm with varying dy-namics (like a real arm) and to scale the feedback from vibratory and skin stretch displays to demonstrate a clear improvement in the accuracy of movement. For the final experiments, ten subjects were first trained on the system with visual feedback and then tested with vibratory feedback, skin stretch feedback and no feedback. Both vi-bration and skin stretch improved the subjects ’ performance. For some subjects, a second no-feedback case showed improvement over the initial case, indicating learning; in other cases, the no-feedback performance deteriorated and subjects reported that they had become used to relying on feedback. Overall, skin stretch pro-vided superior results, particularly when the virtual arm was in a low-inertia configuration and at low velocity. The results suggest that small skin-stretch devices could be worn on the body to provide useful proprioceptive information when interacting with virtual en-vironments and in motion training for rehabilitation or sports