Bio-Inspired Electrotactile Feedback: A Framework and Impacts of Multimodal Cues

Abstract

Electrotactile stimulation, as a haptic feedback method, often struggles to evoke high-quality natural sensations. Consequently, despite its practical advantages, it is generally less preferred in human-machine systems than mechanical approaches. In this paper, we propose a bio-inspired stimulation framework that generates signals modelled on afferent neural activity derived from a touch model. By producing more biologically plausible spiking patterns, the proposed approach aims to enhance the realism of perceived tactile sensations. To evaluate these stimulation patterns in a realistic task context and to quantify the influence of visual and movement cues, we conducted a series of subjective experiments under three conditions. The results indicate that bio-inspired modulation was effective: in particular, bio-inspired co-modulation of amplitude and frequency achieved a favourable pressure-irritation trade-off, increasing the probability of perceiving pressure while maintaining low irritation (pressure: 0.78; irritation: 0.24) relative to the other patterns. Visual cues and hand movement further improved feedback quality by significantly increasing the probability of reporting pressure (p$<$0.001) without a corresponding increase in irritation, and by increasing mean naturalness ratings. Overall, these findings demonstrate the potential of bio-inspired electrotactile patterns to improve haptic feedback quality, and highlight the importance of evaluating such methods under realistic, multimodal interaction scenarios.