Smartphone Haptics For Tactile Temporal Discrimination: Preliminary Insights into Measurement of Function

People can distinguish between consecutive tactile stimuli separated by an inter stimulus time interval (ISI). This human function plays a role in sensing finger position, recognizing symbols drawn on skin, identifying 3-D objects, and differentiating between textures. Various conditions, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), impede this function. Tactile temporal discrimination thresholds (TDTs) can be used to assess this function. Establishing TDTs via smartphones would enable a new accessible way of measuring this hand functionality metric at home. This pilot study offers a new method to obtain smartphone enabled TDTs (SE-TDT). SE-TDTs are obtained for ten normative participants and two older adults with MS. We find that SE-TDTs can differentiate between the normative participants and older adults with MS and provide threshold ranges comparable to those found in literature, which were established with the gold standard method of electric skin stimulation.