D'Alonzo Marco, Dosen Strahinja, Cipriani Christian, Farina Dario
IEEE Trans Haptics. 2014 Apr-Jun;7(2):181-90. doi: 10.1109/TOH.2013.52.
An important reason for the abandonment of commercial actuated hand prostheses by the users is the lack of sensory feedback. Wearable afferent interfaces capable of providing electro- or vibro-tactile stimulation have high potential to restore the missing tactile and/or proprioceptive information to the user. By definition, these devices can elicit single modality (i.e., either vibrotactile or electrotactile) substitute sensations. In a recent research we have presented a novel approach comprising hybrid vibro-electrotactile (HyVE) combined stimulation, in order to provide multimodal sensory feedback. An important advantage of this approach is in the size of the design: the HyVE interface is much more compact than two separated single-modality interfaces, since electro- and vibro-tactile stimulators are placed one on top of the other. The HyVE approach has been previously tested in healthy subjects and has shown to provide a range of hybrid stimuli that could be properly discriminated. However, this approach has never been assessed as a method to provide multi-channel stimuli, i.e., stimuli from a variety of stimulators, mapping information from a multitude of sensors on a prosthesis. In this study, the ability of ten healthy subjects to discriminate stimuli and patterns of stimuli from four different five-channel interfaces applied on their forearms was evaluated. We showed that multiple HyVE units could be used to provide multi-channel sensory information with equivalent performance (∼95 percent for single stimuli and ∼80 percent for pattern) to single modality interfaces (vibro- or electro-tactile) larger in size and with better performance than vibrotactile interfaces (i.e., 73 percent for single stimuli and 69 percent for pattern) with the same size. These results are promising in relation to the current availability of multi-functional prostheses with multiple sensors.
用户放弃商用驱动式手部假肢的一个重要原因是缺乏感官反馈。能够提供电触觉或振动触觉刺激的可穿戴传入接口极有可能为用户恢复缺失的触觉和/或本体感觉信息。根据定义，这些设备可以引发单一模态（即，要么是振动触觉要么是电触觉）的替代感觉。在最近的一项研究中，我们提出了一种包含混合振动 - 电触觉（HyVE）组合刺激的新方法，以便提供多模态感官反馈。这种方法的一个重要优点在于设计尺寸：HyVE接口比两个分开的单模态接口紧凑得多，因为电触觉和振动触觉刺激器一个叠放在另一个上面。HyVE方法先前已在健康受试者中进行了测试，并已证明能提供一系列可被正确区分的混合刺激。然而，这种方法从未被评估为一种提供多通道刺激的方法，即来自各种刺激器的刺激，将来自假肢上多个传感器的信息进行映射。在本研究中，评估了十名健康受试者区分施加在其前臂上的四种不同五通道接口的刺激和刺激模式的能力。我们表明，多个HyVE单元可用于提供多通道感官信息，其性能（单刺激约95%，模式约80%）与尺寸更大的单模态接口（振动触觉或电触觉）相当，并且比相同尺寸的振动触觉接口性能更好（即单刺激73%，模式69%）。这些结果对于当前具有多个传感器的多功能假肢的可用性而言很有前景。
