Effects of Dental Glove Thickness on Tactile Perception Through a Tool

Tactile sensation is essential for dentists in detecting and diagnosing teeth and tissues with a dental tool. Gloves can impair this sensation, but they are crucial for protecting both dentists and patients. We must better understand how gloves affect tactile acuity to design gloves that can retain a higher sensitivity. Thickness is one critical parameter of the glove design we are evaluating in this paper. Previous studies have evaluated the role of glove thickness on sensitivity, but not in a tool-mediated interaction. This study characterizes the force, torque, and vibrotactile perception thresholds for 15 participants holding a dental tool while wearing no gloves or gloves of three different thicknesses. We also measure vibration transmission through each glove to determine the level of damping provided by the different thicknesses. Our results show that the force and torque perceptual thresholds increase with increasing the glove thickness, but the vibration perceptual threshold is affected more by how the tool is held then by the gloves. However, the gloves do dampen the vibrations, and the amount of damping increases with thickness.