Hiroyuki Shinoda

Takaaki Kamigaki, Shun Suzuki, Hiroyuki Shinoda

In a typical mid-air haptics system, focused airborne ultrasound provides vibrotactile sensations to localized areas on a bare skin. Herein, a method for displaying thermal sensations to hands where mesh fabric gloves are worn is proposed. The gloves employed in this study are commercially available mesh fabric gloves with sound absorption characteristics, such as cotton work gloves without any additional devices such as Peltier elements. The method proposed in this study can also provide vibrotactile sensations by changing the ultrasonic irradiation pattern. In this paper, we report basic experimental investigations on the proposed method. By performing thermal measurements, we evaluate the local heat generation on the surfaces of both the glove and the skin by focused airborne ultrasound irradiation. In addition, we performed perceptual experiments, thereby confirming that the proposed method produced both thermal and vibrotactile sensations. Furthermore, these sensations were selectively provided to a certain extent by changing the ultrasonic irradiation pattern. These results validate the effectiveness of our method and its feasibility in mid-air haptics applications.

Akihito Noda, Hiroyuki Shinoda

We propose a power and data transfer network on a conductive fabric material based on an existing serial communication protocol, Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C). We call the proposed network Inter-IC for Wearables (I2We). Continuous dc power and I2C-formatted data are simultaneously transferred to tiny sensor nodes distributed on a double-sided conductive textile. The textile has two conductive sides isolated from each other and is used as a single planar transmission line. I2C data are transferred along with dc power supply based on frequency division multiplexing (FDM). Two carriers are modulated with the clock (SCL) and the data (SDA) signals of I2C. A modulation and demodulation circuit is designed to enable using off-the-shelf I2C-interfaced sensor ICs. One significant originality of this work is that a special filter to enable passive modulation is designed by locating its impedance poles and zeros at appropriate frequencies. The proposed scheme enables flexible implementation of wearable sensor systems in which multiple off-the-shelf tiny sensors are distributed all over a wear.

Keisuke Hasegawa, Tatsuma Sakurai, Yasutoshi Makino et al.

In this paper, we report a method of intuitively transmitting symbolic information to untrained users via only their hands without using any visual or auditory cues. Our simple concept is presenting three-dimensional letter trajectories to the user's hand via a stylus which is mechanically manipulated. By this simple method, in our experiments, participants were able to read 14 mm-high lower-case letters displayed at a rate of one letter per second with an accuracy rate of 71.9% in their first trials, which was improved to 91.3% after a five-minute training period. These results showed small individual differences among participants (standard deviation of 12.7% in the first trials and 6.7% after training). We also found that this accuracy was still retained to a high level (85.1% with SD of 8.2%) even when the letters were reduced to a height of 7 mm. Thus, we revealed that sighted adults potentially possess the ability to read small letters accurately at normal writing speed using their hands.

Tomasz M. Rutkowski, Hiromu Mori, Takumi Kodama et al.

We report on an extended robot control application of a contact-less and airborne ultrasonic tactile display (AUTD) stimulus-based brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm, which received last year The Annual BCI Research Award 2014. In the award winning human communication augmentation paradigm the six palm positions are used to evoke somatosensory brain responses, in order to define a novel contactless tactile BCI. An example application of a small robot management is also presented in which the users control a small robot online.

Katsuhiko Hamada, Hiromu Mori, Hiroyuki Shinoda et al.

This chapter presents results of our project, which studied whether contactless and airborne ultrasonic tactile display (AUTD) stimuli delivered to a user's palms could serve as a platform for a brain computer interface (BCI) paradigm. We used six palm positions to evoke combined somatosensory brain responses to implement a novel contactless tactile BCI. This achievement was awarded the top prize in the Annual BCI Research Award 2014 competition. This chapter also presents a comparison with a classical attached vibrotactile transducer-based BCI paradigm. Experiment results from subjects performing online experiments validate the novel BCI paradigm.

Katsuhiko Hamada, Hiromu Mori, Hiroyuki Shinoda et al.

We study the extent to which contact-less and airborne ultrasonic tactile display (AUTD) stimuli delivered to the palms of a user can serve as a platform for a brain computer interface (BCI) paradigm. Six palm positions are used to evoke combined somatosensory brain responses, in order to define a novel contact-less tactile BCI. A comparison is made with classical attached vibrotactile transducers. Experiment results of subjects performing online experiments validate the novel BCI paradigm.