A Survey of Tactile‐Sensing Systems and Their Applications in Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

Over the past few decades, tactile sensors have become an emerging field of research in both academia and industry. Recent advances have demonstrated application of tactile sensors in the area of biomedical engineering and opened up new opportunities for building multifunctional electronic skin (e-skin) which is capable of imitating the human sense-of-touch for medical purposes. Analyses have shown that current smart tactile sensing technology has the advantages of high performance, low-cost, time efficiency, and ease-of-fabrication. Tactile sensing systems have thus sufficiently matured for integration into several fields related to biomedical engineering. Furthermore, artificial intelligence has the potential for being applied in human-machine interfacing, for instance, in medical robotic manipulation, especially during minimally invasive robotic surgery, where tactile sensing is usually a problem. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the state of the art of tactile sensors. We focus on the technical details of transduction mechanisms such as piezoresistivity, capacitance, piezoelectricity, and triboelectric and highlight the role of novel and commonly used materials in tactile sensing. In addition, we discuss contributions that have been reported in the field of biomedical engineering, which includes its present and future applications in building multifunctional e-skins, human-machine interfaces, and minimally invasive surgical robots. Finally, some challenges and notable improvements that have been made in the technical aspects of tactile sensing systems are reported.

Smartphone-Enabled Personalized Diagnostics: Current Status and Future Prospects

“…Haptic feedback is integrated into mobile devices using mainly eccentric rotating mass (ERM) motors that vibrate around 200 Hz. This frequency is close to the optimum 250 Hz picked up by the Pacinian corpuscles present in the skin [56]. However, this frequency is also well suited to enhance diffusion and increase the rate of transportcontrolled processes, such as homogeneous reactions in microchannels and interfacial processes, and, particularly, electrochemical detection.…”

Tactile Object Recognition for Humanoid Robots Using New Designed Piezoresistive Tactile Sensor and DCNN

“…A tactile sensor array can be developed with several operating principles, and it has various shapes and sizes depending on applications [7][8][9][10][11][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. There are many types of tactile sensors, which can be categorized by the working principles such as piezoresistive [21,22], capacitive [23,24], piezoelectric [25,26], and optical [27,28], etc.…”

“…There are many types of tactile sensors, which can be categorized by the working principles such as piezoresistive [ 21 , 22 ], capacitive [ 23 , 24 ], piezoelectric [ 25 , 26 ], and optical [ 27 , 28 ], etc. This research focused on designing the tactile sensor array based on the piezoresistive principle due to the simple structure, high sensitivity, low cost, and robustness [ 9 , 10 , 16 , 20 , 21 ]. This type of tactile sensor array is commonly used in various applications such as medical [ 5 , 7 , 20 ], industrial manufacturing [ 29 ], civil engineering [ 30 ], and human-like activities [ 31 ], etc.…”

Facile Fabrication of 3D Porous Sponges Coated with Synergistic Carbon Black/Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes for Tactile Sensing Applications

“…In the recent years, advances in artificial intelligence and the internet of things have made it obvious that high performance flexible tactile sensors are a crucial sensing element, and they have become a research hotspot with growing demands in the electronic industry, with enormous practical applications, including personalized health-care monitoring systems [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ], electronic skin [ 5 , 6 , 7 ], and human–machine interactions [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. Primarily, tactile sensors are applied in robotic systems to imitate human perception systems of a diverse range of external pressures and to perform interventional tasks.…”