Haptics is a recent enhancement to virtual environments allowing users to “touch” and feel the simulated objects they interact with. Current commercial products allow tactile feedback through desktop interfaces (such as the FEELIt mouse or the PHANToM arm) and dextrous tactile and force feedback at the fingertips through haptic gloves (such as the CyberTouch and the CyberGrasp). Haptics VR ...

Diminished balance ability poses a serious health risk due to the increased likelihood of falling, and impaired postural stability is significantly associated with blindness and poor vision. Noise stimulation (by improving the detection of sub-threshold somatosensory information) and tactile supplementation (i.e., additional haptic information provided by an external contact surface) have been ...

The observation of touch can be grounded in the activation of brain areas underpinning direct tactile experience, namely the somatosensory cortices. What is the behavioral impact of such a mirror sensory activity on visual perception? To address this issue, we investigated the causal interplay between observed and felt touch in right brain-damaged patients, as a function of their underlying dam...

Previous studies have shown that neural oscillations in the 8- to 12-Hz range influence sensory perception. In the current study, we examined whether both the power and phase of these mu/alpha oscillations predict successful conscious tactile perception. Near-threshold tactile stimuli were applied to the left hand while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded over the contralateral ...

For robots to perform advanced manipulation in a world of unknowns, touch is a critical source of information, and a high-quality tactile sensor is essential. However, existing tactile sensors generally are low-resolution and/or non-compliant, making it difficult to capture detailed contact information for manipulation that humans are very good at. GelSight was first developed a few years ago t...

PURPOSE This laboratory study compared visual-tactile examination with conventional radiographs, digital radiographs, and laser fluorescence in the detection of occlusal occult caries on extracted premolar teeth. METHODS Extracted premolars without obvious caries or restorations were collected from school dental clinics. Occlusal surfaces of 320 extracted premolars were examined visually with...

BACKGROUND Most deaf and severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss patients are incapable to communicate well because of a lack of receiving sound signals. Cochlear implant is one of the effective measures, which has been of great help to the deaf. Up to now, more than 1000 cochlear implants have been accomplished successfully in Iran. Since cochlear implantation is faced with numerous prob...

Adaptive neuroplastic changes have been well documented in congenitally blind individuals for the processing of tactile and auditory information. By contrast, very few studies have investigated olfactory processing in the absence of vision. There is ample evidence that the olfactory system is highly plastic and that blind individuals rely more on their sense of smell than the sighted do. The ol...