LAUSR

We proposed a transcutaneous electrical stimulation method to elicit pressure and vibration at any intended intensity and/or frequency. First, pressure and vibration were induced via a series of rectangular pulse trains delivered to the surface electrodes placed on the index finger pad of 46 healthy subjects in total. Load cells and coin motors were employed to quantify the perception intensity and frequency of the elicited sensations. We observed that the perception intensity and frequency were almost linearly correlated with the stimulation intensity and frequency, respectively, with the correlation coefficients larger than 0.96. The strong consistency of the sensation quality within an individual enabled us to find the stimulus parameters, the pulse amplitude and frequency, for a given (desired) intensity and frequency of pressure and vibration. Finally, experiments were conducted to give reliability to the proposed method by applying the estimated pulse parameters; the errors between the intended intensity/frequency and the perception intensity/ frequency were less than 5%. The results suggested that the proposed method can be employed to collect and process the tactile sensor information, and then cause the user to ‘feel’ the same sensation via appropriate transcutaneous electrical stimulation.