Evaluating Factors Affecting the Perception of Multi-Sensory Vibration and Skin-Squeeze Cues During Voluntary Movement

Haptic wearables are capable of increasing realism in VR/AR, enabling an additional stream of information in robotic teleoperation, and augmenting feedback for motor learning. However, it is not clear how the perceptual capacity of end-users may be affected by real-world scenarios. Specifically, we hypothesized that perception of multi-sensory cues would be less accurate when the cues were presented during voluntary movement as opposed to cues presented at rest. We also believed that differences in haptic perception might be overcome with data-driven models of user perception. In this study, participants respond to a multi-sensory haptic cue indicating the direction and speed with vibration and skin squeeze, respectively. The accuracy of this response was evaluated at rest and during voluntary motion. The experimental results demonstrate that voluntary motion does not have a significant impact on the perception accuracy of haptic cues. Perception models were fit to the participant responses and compared using absolute decoding error. The results of the model analysis shows that data-driven models could be used to provide improved haptic feedback across users.