Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Toes: Can Toes Match Fingers for Haptic Discrimination?

In comparison with fingers, toes are relatively unexplored candidates for multi-site haptic rendering. This is likely due to their reported susceptibility to erroneous perception of haptic stimuli, owing to their anatomical structure. We hypothesize that this shortcoming can be mitigated by careful design of the tactile encoding to account for the idiosyncrasies of toe perception. Our efforts to design such an encoding achieved an improved perceptual accuracy of 18% for poking and 16% for vibrotactile stimuli. As we demonstrate, in this article, the resulting perceptual accuracy achieved by the proposed tactile encoding approaches that of the fingers, allowing for consideration of the toes as a practical location to render multi-site haptic stimuli.