Vibrating insoles for tactile communication with the feet

Abstract

This paper presents further development of a wearable electronic tactile display that stimulates the mechanoreceptors in the foot sole with vibrations. Following the lessons learned from a previous prototype, we propose a technologically improved second device and new optimized tactile patterns that lead to significant advances in tactile-foot perception. A series of experiments involving directional information, pattern and emotion recognition, and language learning were conducted with 20 healthy sighted voluntary subjects. Results obtained confirm the pertinence of these advances and show the potentials of podotactile stimulation and the proposed device.