Human Perception Across the Lifespan as the Basis of a Tactile Internet for Everyone

The past decade has witnessed a surge of developments in telecommunication and digitalization technologies for a new type of communication infrastructure. In particular, the Tactile Internet (TI) provides new multisensory avenues for humans to experience and control processes in remote and virtual environments through digitalized tactile and kinesthetic information. Thus, interactive exchanges in TI go beyond the commonly utilized visual and auditory modalities. Breakthroughs in TI technologies have great potentials for impacting key aspects of human life. Here we review empirical evidence, showing that human perception along with their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms undergo substantial changes across the lifespan. Such age-related changes affect the speed, precision, and capacity of the information perceivers and senders in the loop of digitally transmitted communications. Using the development of vibrotactile codecs as an example, we illustrate that age-related differences in basic human factors of perception need to be careful scrutinized in order to develop TI technologies that could serve the needs of broad populations of people of different ages.