Development of tactile sensor for monitoring skin conditions

This paper is concerned with the development of a haptic sensor for monitoring the human skin conditions. The sensor is an assembly of layered media. The base of the sensor is a copper plate, on which a vulcanized rubber, a PVDF film with electrode patches and a protective surface layer of acetate film are stacked in sequence. The sensor is attached onto the tip of an elastic cantilevered beam and pressed against a sample fabric with a prescribed contact force. The beam is translated linearly over the sample fabric with a constant speed to collect the tactile information on the fabric by the piezoceramic sensor. The features on the data are extracted by calculating both the temporal average of the absolute output signal and the intensity of power in the mid-frequency range and plotting then two-dimensionally on the xy-plane. Further the sensor is slid over the human bare skin and the skin with a sticking plaster to see whether the sensor can discriminate the two skin conditions.