Fluidic Haptic Textile Devices

Our sense of touch offers a useful mode of communication through haptics that can augment the often-crowded visual and auditory pathways, but haptic devices have yet to be fully integrated into garments and other soft wearables in a way that maintains the compliance and comfort of everyday clothing, resulting in a barrier to widespread adoption.

In collaboration with the Rice Preston Innovation (PI) Lab, we introduce a haptic device—a squeeze band—made entirely from textiles. This textile-based device is actuated by pressurized air, and its force-pressure response can be tailored in a controllable manner by altering the geometry of internal inflatable regions within the device during a rapid and inexpensive process of fabrication. We describe this fabrication and characterize six different squeeze bands that exemplify the highly tunable nature of our textile-based approach to wearable haptic devices.

Relevant Publications:

  •  Z. A. Zook, A. Yousaf, B. Jumet, D. J. Preston, and M. K. O’Malley, “Multiscale Textile-Based Haptic Interactions,” Advanced Intelligent Systems, In preparation.
  • B. Jumet, Z. A. Zook, A. Yousaf, A. Rajappan, D. Xu, T. F. Yap, N. Fino, Z. Liu, M. K. O’Malley, and D. J. Preston, “Fluidic Haptic Textiles with Material Preprogramming,” Science Robotics, In review.
  • Fino, Z. A. Zook, B. Jumet, D. J. Preston, M. K. O’Malley, “A Soft Approach to Convey Vibrotactile Feedback in Wearables Through Mechanical Hysteresis,” 2023 IEEE Robosoft Conference, April 3-7, Singapore.
  • Fino, B. Jumet, Z. A. Zook, D. J. Preston, M. K. O’Malley, “Mechanofluidic Instability-Driven Wearable Textile Vibrotactor,” 2023 IEEE World Haptics Conference, In review.
  • B. Jumet et al., “A Textile-Based Approach to Wearable Haptic Devices,” 2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), Edinburgh, United Kingdom, 2022, pp. 741-746, doi: 10.1109/RoboSoft54090.2022.9762149.