TU München: Mapping the forces of a handshake
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The Technische Universität München provided a tactile map of forces applied in a human handshake. Two sets of experiments, in which more than one thousand handshakes were recorded with a tactile sensing glove (see article in section on haptic devices), provided the required data. The data has been processed with Matlab, producing frames visualized in kPa units and a section of pressure signal versus time (see figure above). |
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In a next step the force values had to be derived from the pressure data. The major problem in the data analysis is that grip force is distributed throughout the whole contact area and each small sensor unit can only pick up locally applied pressure. Forces applied in-between the sensors get lost. TUM solved the problem by interpolating the measured forces. Another problem was the determination of individual forces applied to the whole area at each time. This was solved with a clustering strategy: In a usual handshake the thumb is one centre of force on the upper part of the partner’s hand while the fingers pressing the lower part form four centres of force. TUM observed the fact that the upper part of the hand has more than the unique centre assumed, while the lower part has less than four. The two centres of force in the upper part are applied by the two links of the thumb, while the two lower centres show that only two fingers are mainly active during handshake; the information of the rest fingers acting tenderly are covered by sensor noise (see figure below). |
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