Let's read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd the perception of the visual world to read.

The Perception of the Visual World. By James J. Gibson. U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London). Price 35s.

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand.

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Wearable Haptic Systems for the Fingertip and the Hand: Taxonomy, Review, and Perspectives

Emotion recognition in human-computer interaction

The structure and function of the skin details the individual components of the epidermis, dermis, and their roles in normal skin health. The individual cell types in the epidermis, the different epidermal layers, and the roles of the keratinocyte are explained. The epidermis and dermis, and their important relation to each other through the dermoepidermal junction are described. The dermal adnexal structures of hair follicles (pilosebaceous units), sweat glands, and nerves are all considered. The functions of skin and barrier function are also listed. Rare but important causes of disordered sweating (hyperhidrosis and hypohidrosis) are described. In addition, presentations of hyperhidrosis are discussed.

Structure and function of the skin

Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems 参加報告

How the human brain controls hand movements to carry out different tasks is still debated. The concept of synergy has been proposed to indicate functional modules that may simplify the control of hand postures by simultaneously recruiting sets of muscles and joints. However, whether and to what extent synergic hand postures are encoded as such at a cortical level remains unknown. Here, we combined kinematic, electromyography, and brain activity measures obtained by functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects performed a variety of movements towards virtual objects. Hand postural information, encoded through kinematic synergies, were represented in cortical areas devoted to hand motor control and successfully discriminated individual grasping movements, significantly outperforming alternative somatotopic or muscle-based models. Importantly, hand postural synergies were predicted by neural activation patterns within primary motor cortex. These findings support a novel cortical organization for hand movement control and open potential applications for brain-computer interfaces and neuroprostheses.

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A synergy-based hand control is encoded in human motor cortical areas

Many applications in teleoperation and virtual reality call for the implementation of effective means of displaying to the human operator information on the softness and other mechanical properties of objects being touched. The ability of humans to detect softness if different objects by tactual exploration is intimately related to both kinesthetic and cutaneous perception, and haptic displays should be designed so as to address such multimodal perceptual channel. In this paper we investigate the possibility of surrogating detailed tactile information for softness discrimination, with information on the rate of spread of the contact area between the finger and the specimen. Devices for implementing this new perceptual channel are described, and some preliminary psychophysical test results reported, validating the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach.

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The role of contact area spread rate in haptic discrimination of softness

Physiological sensors and interfaces for mental healthcare are becoming of great interest in research and commercial fields. Specifically, biomedical sensors and related ad hoc signal processing methods can be profitably used for supporting objective, psychological assessments. However, a simple system able to automatically classify the emotional state of a healthy subject is still missing. To overcome this important limitation, we here propose the use of convex optimization-based electrodermal activity (EDA) framework and clustering algorithms to automatically discern arousal and valence levels induced by affective sound stimuli. EDA recordings were gathered from 25 healthy volunteers, using only one EDA sensor to be placed on fingers. Standardized stimuli were chosen from the International Affective Digitized Sound System database, and grouped into four different levels of arousal (i.e., the levels of emotional intensity) and two levels of valence (i.e., how unpleasant/pleasant a sound can be perceived). Experimental results demonstrated that our system is able to achieve a recognition accuracy of 77.33% on the arousal dimension, and 84% on the valence dimension.

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Arousal and Valence Recognition of Affective Sounds Based on Electrodermal Activity

Interaction with the external world requires the ability to perceive dynamic changes in complex sensorial input and react promptly. Here, we show that perception of dynamic stimuli in the visual and tactile sensory modalities share fundamental psychophysical aspects that can be explained by similar computational models. In vision, optic flow provides information on relative motion between the individual and the content of percept. For instance, radial patterns of optic flow are used to estimate time before contact with an approaching object [J.J. Gibson, What gives rise to the perception of motion? Psychol. Rev. 75 (1968) 335–346]. Similarly, in the tactile modality, radial patterns of stimuli provide information on softness of probed objects [A. Bicchi, D. De Rossi, E.P. Scilingo, The role of the contact area spread rate (CASR) in haptic discrimination of softness, IEEE Trans. Rob. Autom. 16 (2000) 496–504]. Optic flow is also invoked to explain several visual illusions, including the well-known “barber-pole” effect [N. Fisher, J.M. Zanker, The directional tuning of the barber-pole illusion, Perception 30 (2001) 1321–1336]. Here, we introduce a computational model of tactile flow, which is intimately related to existing models for the visual counterpart. The model accounts for psychophysical aspects of dynamic tactile perception and predicts illusory phenomena in the tactile domain, analogous to the barber-pole effect. When subjects touched translating pads with differently oriented gratings, they perceived a direction of motion that was significantly biased towards the orientation of the gratings. Therefore, these findings indicate that visual and tactile flow share similarities at the psychophysical and computational level and may be intended for similar perceptive goals. Results of this analysis have impact on the engineering of better haptic and multimodal interfaces for human–computer interaction.

Research report Tactile flow explains haptic counterparts of common visual illusions

This book explores Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) dynamics as investigated through Electrodermal Activity (EDA) processing It presents groundbreaking research in thetechnical field of biomedical engineering, especially biomedical signal processing, as well as clinical fields ofpsychometrics, affective computing, and psychological assessment This volumedescribes some of the most complete, effective, and personalized methodologies for extracting data from a non-stationary, nonlinear EDA signal in order to characterize the affective and emotional state of a human subject These methodologies are underscored by discussion of real-world applications in mood assessment The text also examines the physiological bases of emotion recognition through noninvasivemonitoring of the autonomic nervous system This is an ideal book forbiomedical engineers, physiologists,neuroscientists, engineers, applied mathmeticians, psychiatric and psychological clinicians, and graduate students in these fields This book also:Expertly introduces a novel approach for EDA analysis based on convex optimization and sparsity, a topic of rapidly increasing interestAuthoritatively presents groundbreaking research achieved using EDA as an exemplarybiomarker of ANS dynamicsDeftly exploresEDA's potential as a source of reliable and effective markers for the assessment of emotional responses in healthy subjects,as well as for the recognition of pathological mood states in bipolar patients

Enzo Pasquale Scilingo

Papers

A synergy-based hand control is encoded in human motor cortical areas

The role of contact area spread rate in haptic discrimination of softness

Arousal and Valence Recognition of Affective Sounds Based on Electrodermal Activity

Research report Tactile flow explains haptic counterparts of common visual illusions

Advances in Electrodermal Activity Processing with Applications for Mental Health: From Heuristic Methods to Convex Optimization