Towards Wearability in Fingertip Haptics: A 3-DoF Wearable Device for Cutaneous Force Feedback

Wearability will significantly increase the use of haptics in everyday life, as has already happened for audio and video technologies. The literature on wearable haptics is mainly focused on vibrotactile stimulation, and only recently, wearable devices conveying richer stimuli, like force vectors, have been proposed. This paper introduces design guidelines for wearable haptics and presents a novel 3-DoF wearable haptic interface able to apply force vectors directly to the fingertip. It consists of two platforms: a static one, placed on the back of the finger, and a mobile one, responsible for applying forces at the finger pad. The structure of the device resembles that of parallel robots, where the fingertip is placed in between the static and the moving platforms. This work presents the design of the wearable display, along with the quasi-static modeling of the relationship between the applied forces and the platform's orientation and displacement. The device can exert up to 1.5 N, with a maximum platform inclination of 30 degree. To validate the device and verify its effectiveness, a curvature discrimination experiment was carried out: employing the wearable device together with a popular haptic interface improved the performance with respect of employing the haptic interface alone.