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Evaluation of force and torque magnitude discrimination thresholds on the human hand-arm system

Published: 10 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This article reports on experiments about haptic perception aimed at measuring the force/torque differential thresholds applied to the hand-arm system. The experimental work analyzes how force is sent back to the user by means of a 6 degrees-of-freedom haptic device. Our findings on force perception indicate that the just-noticeable-difference is generally higher than previously reported in the literature and not constant along the stimulus continuum. We found evidence that the thresholds change also among the different directions. Furthermore, asymmetries in force perceptions, which were not described in previous reports, can be evinced for most of the directions. These findings support our claim that human beings perceive forces differently along different directions, thus suggesting that perception can also be enhanced by suitable signal processing, that is, with a manipulation of the force signal before it reaches the haptic device. We think that the improvement of the user perception can have a great impact in many applications and in particular we are focusing on surgical teleoperation scenarios.

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  1. Evaluation of force and torque magnitude discrimination thresholds on the human hand-arm system

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
    ACM Transactions on Applied Perception  Volume 8, Issue 1
    October 2010
    156 pages
    ISSN:1544-3558
    EISSN:1544-3965
    DOI:10.1145/1857893
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 10 November 2010
    Accepted: 01 November 2009
    Revised: 01 January 2009
    Received: 01 July 2008
    Published in TAP Volume 8, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. Force thresholds
    2. perceptual asymmetries
    3. perceptual-based signal processing

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    • (2024)A Novel Wrist Device for Characterizing the Components of Proprioceptive Acuity2024 46th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)10.1109/EMBC53108.2024.10782537(1-7)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
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    • (2021)Human Perception of Wrist Torque Magnitude During Upper and Lower Extremity Movement2021 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC)10.1109/WHC49131.2021.9517214(870-870)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2021
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