Multi-Electrode electrotactile Stimulation to Combat Skin Dependency in Machine-to-Human Feedback

The advent of wearable sensing technologies has ushered the need for diversity of techniques to present information to users. This paper presents an electrotactile stimulation hardware and electrode array with the goal of presenting information to the user through the skin. The presented electrotactile stimulation device utilizes a distributed stimulation technique to prevent overloading the skin with electrotactile charges in case of a skin pore breakdown. An experiment was conducted to prove that a six electrode distributed electrotactile stimulation hardware and electrode presented in this paper would prevent skin pore overload in case of a breakdown. The results indicate that the six electrodes are capable of acting independently regardless of the skin resistance they observe.