Passive Haptic Learning

Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) is a method by which users are able to learn motor skills without paying active attention. In past research, vibration is widely applied in PHL as the signal delivered on the participant’s skin. We investigated whether different tactile sensations (tapping, light stroking, and vibration) influence the learning effect of PHL in this work. We built three wearable systems corresponding to the three sensations respectively.

The skin, as the largest organ distributed all over the human body, offers excellent opportunities for different kinds of input stimuli. However, most of the haptic devices can only render single sensations or they need to combine multiple complex components for generating multiple sensations. We present “DragTapVib” in this paper, a novel, ultra-low-cost, wearable actuator that can reliably provide dragging, tapping, and vibrating sensations to the user.