Haptic communication system using cutaneous actuators for simulation of continuous human touch
摘要
說明書
The phoneme-haptic signal converter 1109 converts the phonemes received from the word-phoneme converter 1108 to actuator signals 1111 using the phoneme-haptic signal database 1110. For each phoneme received from the word-phoneme converter 1108, the phoneme-haptic signal converter 1109 accesses the phoneme-haptic signal database 1110 to determine the corresponding sequence of actuator signals 1111 to output. In one embodiment, each phoneme has a single corresponding sequence of actuator signals 1111 stored in the phoneme-haptic signal database. However, in other embodiments, the actuator signals 1111 corresponding to a phoneme depend upon other phonemes surrounding a phoneme in a word. In such a case, the phoneme-haptic signal converter 1109 may search for a phoneme in the phoneme-haptic signal database 1110, but also search for the phoneme with its immediately preceding phoneme, its immediately following phoneme, and a sequence including the immediately preceding phoneme, the phoneme itself, and the immediately following phoneme. If the phoneme-haptic signal converter 1109 identifies multiple matches in the phoneme-haptic-signal database 1110, the phoneme-haptic signal converter 1109 may select one based on priority rules for that phoneme, or may use default rules, such as selecting first the match that matches all three phonemes, then the match that matches the phoneme and its preceding phoneme, and then the match that matches the phoneme and the following phoneme, and so on. For example, the word apple has the phonetic translation of “,” which comprises the phonemes “ae,” “p,” “ah,” and “l(fā).” In this case, a match in the phoneme-haptic signal database 1110 may indicate that the phoneme “p” preceded by “ae” should result in a different corresponding sequence of actuator signals 1111 than the phoneme “p” in any other scenario. In that case, the different actuator signal is selected by the phoneme-haptic signal converter 1109 for output in correspondence with detecting the “p” phoneme.
