Haptic Relocation Away From the Fingertip: Where, Why, and How

Tactile haptic devices are often designed to render meaningful, complex, and realistic touch-based information on users’ skin. While fingertips and hands are the most preferred body locations to render haptic feedback, recent trends allow such feedback to be extended to alternative body locations (e.g., wrist, arm, torso, foot) for various scenarios due to reasons such as wearability and needs of the application. In this paper, I address the new concept of haptic relocation. It refers to scenarios in which the expected feedback is related to the fingertips but rendered on a different body location instead – e.g., contact forces registered by two robotic fingers during teleoperation rendered to the users’ wrist instead of the fingers. I investigated the design choices of wearable haptic devices for haptic relocation concerning different body locations, targeted applications, and actuator selection. I discuss approaches and design choices from the literature by speculating on the possible reasons, and conclude the paper by highlighting some challenges and issues to be mindful of in the future. This paper will guide engineers and researchers in searching for alternative haptic rendering solutions – especially when fingers and hands are not available for haptic interaction.