Sensors and actuators of wearable haptic master device for the disabled

This paper addresses sensors and actuators for a wearable haptic master device for physically handicapped persons whose arms are disabled. In the first part of this paper, optical fiber curvature sensors are used to measure the human body motion. An efficient calibration and interpolation method of the sensors is then proposed to extract 2-DOF human shoulder motions. In the second part of this paper, solenoid vibrotactile actuators are used to feed back the contact force. Experimental results show that tactile-force substitution is helpful for force regulating tasks and that the frequency and magnitude of vibrotactile stimulus should be increased exponentially to achieve the linearly increased force sensing.