Study on Control Method of Virtual Food Texture by Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Abstract

We propose Electric Food Texture System, which can present virtual food texture such as hardness and elasticity by electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to the masseter muscle. In our previous study, we investigated the feasibility to detect user's bite with a photoreflector and that to construct database of food texture with electromyography sensors. In this paper, we investigated the feasibility to control virtual food texture by EMS. We conducted an experiment to reveal the relationship of the parameters of EMS and those of virtual food texture. The experimental results show that the higher strength of EMS is, the harder virtual food texture is, and the longer duration of EMS is, the more elastic virtual food texture is.