Think of the following situations:

* Wearing a robot that makes you feel as happy – or sad – as your friend while you’re instant messaging.

* Nurses train in life saving techniques by carrying external skeletons that weigh exactly like a real patient.

* Putting on a technology that makes your body sensitive to faraway objects.

It all does sound a bit like sci-fi.   But wearable haptic technology, or haptics, is very real.

Originally it meant ‘to touch’ in Greek. Nowadays it is described as “doing for the sense of touch what computer graphics did for vision”. And what’s revolutionary about this hot research topic is that is has serious real world applications.

In this week’s Skoltech Seminar, Dr. Dzmitry Tsetserukou explores, explains and demonstrates some of the most amazing – and very real – applications of wearable tech.

May 21, 2014
13.30 – 15.00
Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)

Title: «Nanoscale simulations for clean renewable wearable haptic technologies for telexistence, telecommunication, and medical applications»

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

Wearable haptic technology is a category of devices incorporating electronic technology and haptic actuators for presentation of tactile stimuli (force, vibration, pressure, temperature) to the wearer. The talk will focus on four mainstream projects employing wearable interfaces with haptic feedback: NAVIgoid, NurseSim, LinkTouch, and iFeel_IM!.

NAVIgoid consists of a master wearable robot and intelligent mobile robot. The developed interface allows the operator to use their body posture and gestures for controlling the mobile robot and at the same time to feel remote objects through sense of touch.

NurseSim is a novel VR simulator for nurses who become better at carrying an unconscious persons and maintain their posture correctly by wearing a haptic exoskeleton. Nurses lift the ‘body’ of care-receiver in simulated 3D environment. The haptic display generates a sensation of the patient’s weight.

LinkTouch is an innovative wearable haptic device with a five-bar linkage mechanism for presentation of 2-DoF force feedback at the finger pad. The application of Link-Touch for a wrist-worn device capable of online blood pressure measurement will be demonstrated.

iFeel_IM! is an intelligent system for feeling enhancement. It is powered by affect sensitive Instant Messenger which intensifies feelings and reproduces the emotions felt by a partner during online communication. The system elicits emotions by rich haptic and visual stimuli.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

Dzmitry Tsetserukou received the Ph.D. degree in Information Science and Technology from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2007. From 2007 to 2009, he was a JSPS Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Tokyo. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Toyohashi University of Technology. He is a member of the IEEE since 2005, VRSJ and the author of over 70 technical publications, 3 patents and a book .

He received Best Paper Award at Augmented Human 2010, and Best Student Presentation Award at I RAGO 2013 as coauthor. Dzmitry was an organizer of the first Workshop on Affective Haptics at IEEE Haptics Symposium 2012.

 

* The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) is a private graduate research university in Skolkovo, Russia, a suburb of Moscow. Established in 2011 in collaboration with MIT, Skoltech educates global leaders in innovation, advance scientific knowledge, and foster new technologies to address critical issues facing Russia and the world. Applying international research and educational models, the university integrates the best Russian scientific traditions with twenty-first century entrepreneurship and innovation.