Comparative Analysis of Tactile Sensibility between the Fingers in Vibrotactile Stimulus Recognition

It is presented in this paper the methodological procedures for the accomplishment of psychophysics tests with blind people aiming for evaluating the tactile system discriminative capability towards vibrating stimuli. It will also be presented and evaluated the results of tests with blind people. The procedure for these tests consist of making the blind person try to identify a standard vibrate stimulus (target frequency) after an initial stimulus is sent (initial frequency). Three target frequencies were chosen and the initial stimulus is a frequency, randomly chosen, higher or lower than the target frequency. The procedure starts when a blind person is trained to identify a target frequency. After that, an initial frequency is set, and the blind person may increase or decrease the frequency until the person believes achieved the target frequency. This test is carried out to evaluate and comparison of the tactile sensibility for all fingers on the hand.