Three-Way Multidimensional Scaling

Sensory neurons within skin form an interface between the external physical reality and the inner tactile perception. This interface enables sensory information to be organized identified, and interpreted through perceptual learning-the process whereby the sensing abilities improve through experience. Here, an artificial sensory neuron that can integrate and differentiate the spatiotemporal features of touched patterns for recognition is shown. The system comprises sensing, transmitting, and processing components that are parallel to those found in a sensory neuron. A resistive pressure sensor converts pressure stimuli into electric signals, which are transmitted to a synaptic transistor through interfacial ionic/electronic coupling via a soft ionic conductor. Furthermore, the recognition error rate can be dramatically decreased from 44% to 0.4% by integrating with the machine learning method. This work represents a step toward the design and use of neuromorphic electronic skin with artificial intelligence for robotics and prosthetics.

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An Artificial Sensory Neuron with Tactile Perceptual Learning.

Mimicking Human and Biological Skins for Multifunctional Skin Electronics

Sensory memory, formed at the beginning while perceiving and interacting with the environment, is considered a primary source of intelligence. Transferring such biological concepts into electronic implementation aims at achieving perceptual intelligence, which would profoundly advance a broad spectrum of applications, such as prosthetics, robotics, and cyborg systems. Here, the recent developments in the design and fabrication of artificial sensory memory devices are summarized and their applications in recognition, manipulation, and learning are highlighted. The emergence of such devices benefits from recent progress in both bioinspired sensing and neuromorphic engineering technologies and derives from abundant inspiration and benchmarks from an improved understanding of biological sensory processing. Increasing attention to this area would offer unprecedented opportunities toward new hardware architecture of artificial intelligence, which could extend the capabilities of digital systems with emotional/psychological attributes. Pending challenges are also addressed to aspects such as integration level, energy efficiency, and functionality, which would undoubtedly shed light on the future development of translational implementations.

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Artificial Sensory Memory.

Self-powered artificial synapses actuated by triboelectric nanogenerator

This paper reviews the literature on tactual perception. Throughout this review, we will highlight some of the most relevant aspects in the touch literature: type of stimuli; type of participants; type of tactile exploration; and finally, the interaction between touch and other senses. Regarding type of stimuli, we will analyse studies with abstract stimuli such as vibrations, with two- and three-dimensional stimuli, and also concrete stimuli, considering the relation between familiar and unfamiliar stimuli and the haptic perception of faces. Under the “type of participants” topic, we separated studies with blind participants, studies with children and adults, and also performed an overview of sex differences in performance. The type of tactile exploration is explored considering conditions of active and passive touch, the relevance of movement in touch and the relation between haptic exploration and time. Finally, interactions between touch and vision, touch and smell and touch and taste are explored in the last topic. The review ends with an overall conclusion on the state of the art for the tactual perception literature. With this work, we intend to present an organised overview of the main variables in touch experiments, compiling aspects reported in the tactual literature, and attempting to provide both a summary of previous findings, and a guide to the design of future works on tactual perception and memory, through a presentation of implications from previous studies.

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Tactual perception: a review of experimental variables and procedures

Exploring Measures of Workload, Situation Awareness, and Task Performance in the Main Control Room☆

There is a need for efficient and transparent human performance measurement methods to support interface evaluation for control room modernization projects. This paper presents experiences from the second pilot test of a micro task method developed to support this need. We benchmarked performance with analog control boards in a nuclear power plant control room simulator against performance with a modern overview display. Within 2.5 hours of simulator time and with 16 licensed operators as participants, we collected data for 1152 micro task questions, recording response time and accuracy for each question. The paper describes the study methodology and results, and draws conclusions about the future use of the micro task method for evaluation and training.

Micro Task Evaluation of Analog Vs. Digital Power Plant Control Room Interfaces

Telemedicine in Oil and Gas: Current Status and Potential Improvements☆

The aim of this study was to identify the tactile dimensions in the discrimination of light-weight wool fabrics. The participants judged the overall similarity between 21 light-weight wool fabrics using free sorting tasks. The fabrics were evaluated using active touch with limited exploratory procedure. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to generate the perceptual space, revealing one dimension of tactile perception. Finally, through regression analysis we were able to interpret this dimension, using verbal attributes and physical properties of the fabrics. We discuss the relevance of the stimuli properties and the associations between verbal attributes and between physical properties, on the evaluation of the fabrics, considering its theoretical implications.

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Alexandra Fernandes

Papers

Tactual perception: a review of experimental variables and procedures

Exploring Measures of Workload, Situation Awareness, and Task Performance in the Main Control Room☆

Micro Task Evaluation of Analog Vs. Digital Power Plant Control Room Interfaces

Telemedicine in Oil and Gas: Current Status and Potential Improvements☆

Tactile Perceptual Dimensions: A Study with Light-Weight Wool Fabrics