Mariacarla Memeo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Technician at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

Tactile maps are efficient tools to improve spatial understanding and mobility skills of visually impaired people. Their limited adaptability can be compensated with haptic devices which display graphical information, but their assessment is frequently limited to performance-based metrics only which can hide potential spatial abilities in O&M proto...

In this work we study how the kind and number of geometrical descriptors affects the way real objects are matched to virtual 2.5D objects, rendered with a 3DOF tactile mouse. We show that elevation or inclination cues are sufficient to recognize a small tactile dictionary of geometrical solids, but that their combination works at best. We also show...

Aberrant motor-sensory predictive functions have been linked to symptoms of psychosis, particularly reduced attenuation of self-generated sensations and misattribution of self-generated actions. Building on the parallels between prediction of self- and other-generated actions, this study aims to investigate whether individuals with psychosis also d...

Frequently in rehabilitation, visually impaired persons are passive agents of exercises with fixed environmental constraints. In fact, a printed tactile map, i.e. a particular picture with a specific spatial arrangement, can usually not be edited. Interaction with map content, instead, facilitates the learning of spatial skills because it exploits...

Background In this work, we present a novel sensory substitution system that enables to learn three dimensional digital information via touch when vision is unavailable. The system is based on a mouse-shaped device, designed to jointly perceive, with one finger only, local tactile height and inclination cues of arbitrary scalar fields. The device h...

With interactive maps a person can manage to find the way from one point to another, using an allocentric perspective (e.g. Google Maps), but also looking at a location as from the inside of the map with an egocentric perspective (e.g. Google Street View). Such experience cannot be performed with tactile maps, mostly explored from a top-view. To so...

In this work we present a new haptic assistive device, the TActile MOuse 3 (TAMO3), designed to support construction of mental maps in absence of vision. Since curvature is a sufficient information in recognition and classification of shapes [11] we evaluate TAMO3 in a curvature discrimination task: curves were rendered, on one finger only, through...

The computation of skin forces and deformations for tactile rendering requires an accurate model of the extremely nonlinear behavior of the skin. In this work, we investigate the characterization of finger mechanics with the goal of designing accurate nonlinear models for tactile rendering. First, we describe a measurement setup that enables the ac...

The access to graphical information is difficult for individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Taking advantage of the residual sensory abilities such as touch is one way to solve this issue. However, it is not yet clear if blind subjects perceive new tacto-spatial information in the same way that sighted people do. In this work we code the d...

Conveying spatial information to visually impaired people is possible by leveraging residual tactile abilities. It is still unclear how to effectively evaluate mental map construction beyond performance-based metrics. Here we use a minimalistic mouse-shaped tactile device to display tactile virtual objects. We study how task complexity and visual d...

Research on tactile sensitivity has been conducted since the last century and many devices have been proposed to study in detail this sense through experimental tests. The sense of touch is essential in every-day life of human beings, but it can also play a fundamental role for the assessment of some neurological disabilities and pathologies. In fa...

Sensing in humans is carried out in different modalities, among them, the touch is essential in every-day life allowing most of all the manual activities. Less known is the fundamental role in the screening of some neurological diseases. In fact it is possible, trough the assessment of the level of tactile perception, to evaluate during clinical/me...

There is a great interest in exploring the proprieties of the sense of the touch, its detailed knowledge in fact is a key issue in the area of robotics, haptics and human-machine interaction. In this paper, the authors focus their attention on a novel measurement method for the assessment of the tactile stiffness based on a original test rig; tacti...