Wearable fingertip tactile display

Tactile sensation is one of the most important sensory functions for human perception of objects. Recently, there have been many technical challenges in the field of tactile sensing as well as tactile display. In this paper, we propose an innovative tactile display device based on soft actuator technology with ElectroActive Polymer(EAP). This device offers advantageous features over existing devices with respect to intrinsic flexibility, softness, ease of fabrication and miniaturization, high power density, and cost effectiveness. In particular, it can be adapted to various geometric configurations because it possesses structural flexibility, so it can be worn on any part of the human body such as finger, palm, and arm etc. It can be extensively applied as a wearable tactile display, a Braille device for the visually disabled, and a human interface in the future. A new design of the flexible actuator is proposed and its basic operational principles are discussed. In addition, a wearable tactile display device with 4×5 actuator array(20 actuator cells) is developed and its effectiveness is confirmed.