Exploring the Influence of Displacement, Velocity and Actuation Duration on Skin Stretch Perception

Since skin stretch is a component of natural proprioception, it has been studied across different applications to convey artificial haptic information. However, despite previous studies showing that skin stretch perception is affected by device stretch parameters, such as the stretch velocity and contact force, our understanding of which parameters influence cue perception is incomplete. In this paper, a user study was conducted with a rocker-shaped skin stretch de-vice to explore the just noticeable difference and cognitive requirement in response to different stimuli that varied the stretch displacement, velocity and actuation time. The results show that participants struggled to interpret the differences between stimuli that kept a constant stretch displacement and that the addition of varying velocity cues did not result in clear performance and perception improvements. This validates previous assumption that skin stretch feedback is primarily understood as displacement information.