IEEE ICIA 2010 Conference
Plenary Talk 2

Haptic Human-Machine Interfaces: History, Opportunities and Challenges

Hong Z. Tan, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
School of Mechanical Engineering (courtesy)
Department of Psychological Sciences (courtesy)
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907, U.S.A.
Tel: (765) 494-4600, Fax:
E-mail: hongtan@purdue.edu

Abstract:
For a long time, the sense of touch has been regarded as an inferior sense as compared to vision or audition. However, the potential to receive information tactually is well illustrated by some natural communication methods used by individuals with severe auditory and/or visual impairments. With the advent of cellphones and handheld digital devices, there are renewed interests in transmitting information tactually for privacy or enhanced interaction experience. My talk will start with a historic review of vibrotactile displays for sensory substitutions with an emphasis on wearable/portable systems. I will then provide an overview of more recent advances in haptics research enabled by force-feedback human-machine interfaces. Looking towards the future, more advanced tactile displays for conveying surface curvature and skin stretch information as well as thermal displays will likely lead to major breakthroughs in this fast-growing research field. Throughout the talk, I will introduce new findings on human sensorimotor and cognitive capabilities in the context of exciting applications including haptic cueing of visual attention for warning systems, surgery and skill training, and the use of visuohaptic simulations for teaching abstract physics concepts.

Hong Z. Tan is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering with courtesy appointments in mechanical engineering and psychological sciences at Purdue University. Her research focuses on haptic human-machine interfaces and haptic perception. She received her Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P.R. China. She earned her Master and Doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory before joining the faculty at Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1998. She has held a McDonnell Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University, and a Visiting Associate Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. She was a recipient of the US National Science Foundation's Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Award from 2000 to 2004. In addition to serving on numerous program committees, she was a co-organizer (with Blake Hannaford) of the International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems from 2003 to 2005. More recently, she was the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics, a home for the international interdisciplinary haptics research community, from 2006 to 2008. She is currently an associate editor of Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and IEEE Transactions on Haptics.