🚀 go-pugleaf

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                                THURSDAY, NOV. 4, 1999
                                        4:00 PM
                                Scaife Hall, Room 125
                               Refreshments at 3:30 pm
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                                Dr. Dianne Pawluk
                         Department of Biomedical Engineering
                            Johns Hopkins University


                    "Analysis of the Tactile System in the Hand"


                                    BIO

Dianne T.V. Pawluk is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the department of
Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. She received the
Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1997 with the thesis titled "
A Viscoelastic Model of the Human Fingerpad and a Holistic Model of
Human Touch".

                                  ABSTRACT

Analyzing the tactile system in the hand is not only significant for
a basic understanding of human touch and manipulation, it also has important
applications for the design of minimally invasive surgical tools, tactile
interfaces in teleoperation and virtual reality, robot manipulators and
hand prostheses. The first component of the signal processing pathway is
the mechanics of the fingerpad, whose understanding also has direct
applications to the design of tactile interfaces.

I will begin my talk by discussing some of my experimental and modeling
work examining the contact of the fingerpad with a rigid plate. I found
that I could account for the principal features of the response by
modeling the interaction as the contact of a rigid plane (the object) and
a linear viscoelastic sphere (the fingerpad), modified to include a nonlinear
modulus of elasticity. I will then describe my ongoing experimental work
in examining the neural output of this system by recording from individual
tactile neurons. This work has involved the completion of a high-density
(400 pin) tactile display, a unique equipment advance in the field that
allows us independent control of the spatial, temporal and intensive
dimensions of the mechanical inputs at the surface of the skin. I will
present some preliminary results of the neural responses. Lastly, I will
describe my work in developing models of the mechanoreceptive system in
the hand. Results so far have shown that the Hodgkin-Huxley equations
coupled with simple mechanical components can qualitatively capture the
temporal response properties.