SUMMARY

Many in the USA experience impaired upper-limb function due to medical conditions such as neurological injuries and diseases, or limb amputations.Often these conditions can lead to sensory impairments, incapacitating a person ability to feel touch, temperature, or proprioception: the body’s ability to sense movement, and location. The loss of a limb’s senses can cause the person to feel disconnected from their limb, leading to decreased limb use, or in the case of prosthesis, rejection of the device. A lack of senses also requires constant visual attention for limb control which is very inconvenient. A wearable multimodal haptic feedback device was developed to communicate the senses of the hand when unavailable. The wearable device consists of an armband to be worn around the forearm that communicates the senses of touch, temperature and proprioception via different mechanical actuators and is expected to restore peripheral tactile and proprioceptive sensation in people with sensory impaired limbs.To communicate touch, soft pneumatic actuators were developed to apply pressure proportional to that felt against the fingers onto the forearm. Temperature feedback consists of vibration to signal elevated temperatures that could be harmful. Finally,to communicate proprioception, a skin-stretch feedback system was developed to reflect changes in hand aperture. The combined feedback modalities are expected to provide holistic, real-time information on the position of the hand.This device is novel in that it replaces three different senses and uses different feedback modalities simultaneously. Subject studies were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed device at communicating the senses of the hand when unavailable.Subjects were asked to identify and interpret different levels and combinations of each stimulus.Their performance was evaluated to assess whether the feedback was interpreted as intended making the device suitable for sensory replacement.