Engineering Commons^™

Low-Cost, Biomimetic, Vibrotactile Stimulation For Non-Invasive Sensory Feedback, Joe Kutteh, Alexander Kobilnyk

Summer Scholarship, Creative Arts and Research Projects (SCARP)

Prosthetic limbs provide individuals with amputations the ability to regain function in lost body parts. However, most prostheses are seen as tools rather than the embodiment of the user’s missing limb. To strengthen the connection between prosthesis and user, a sense of touch can be enabled via vibrotactile feedback. The goal of our experiment is to find the just-noticeable-difference (JND) in stimuli that an individual can distinguish while using two different waveforms: biomimetic and traditional. The biomimetic waveform mimics rapidly and slowly adapting receptors in the body by encoding rate-of-change in stimuli at the onset and offset of a more …