論文

Tactile information might be relevant to communication. In recent years, tactile technologies have been developed and it is becoming possible to share tactile sensations to other persons. However, psychological effects of perception of other person's tactile sensations is much less clear. In this study, we aim to investigate psychological effects of receiving tactile information of other person. By using a wearable tactile sensor and a vibrator, image with tactile sensations is compared with that without tactile sensations through questionnaire evaluation.

We feel as if a fake body is our own body by synchronicity between the fake body and the real body (illusory body ownership). The illusory body ownership can be induced to an invisible full body via the synchronous movement of only the hands and feet. We aimed to investigate whether the illusory ownership occurs to a virtual body with an elongated arm by changing position of the one of the hands, and it changes reaching behavior and/or postural stability. We found that the illusory body ownership was induced to the transformed body by synchronous movement of the hands and feet. Participants' reaching behavior gradually changed to use the longer arm more than the normal arm during learning of the transformed body within 10 min. Postural stability did not change. These results suggest that we can have illusory ownership of the transformed body with the elongated arm, and our behavior adaptively changes to utilize the new body.

For most mammals and vertebrate animals, tail plays an important role for their body providing variant functions to expand their mobility, or as a limb that allows manipulation and gripping. In this paper, we propose an exploratory biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail design to allow engineering and expanding human body functions. The proposed tail consists of adjacent joints with a spring-based structure to handle shearing and tangential forces, and allow managing the length and weight of the target tail. The internal structure of the tail is driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip. Here we describe the design and implementation process, and highlight potential applications for using such prosthetic tail.