A host of medical conditions, including amputations, diabetes, stroke, and genetic disease, result in loss of touch sensation. Because most types of sensory loss have no pharmacological treatment or rehabilitative therapy, we propose a haptic sensory prosthesis that provides substitutive feedback. The wrist and forearm are compelling locations for feedback due to available skin area and not occluding the hands, but have reduced mechanoreceptor density compared to the fingertips. Focusing on localized pressure as the feedback modality, we hypothesize that we can improve on prior devices by invoking a wider range of stimulus intensity using multiple points of pressure to evoke spatial summation, which is the cumulative perceptual experience from multiple points of stimuli. We conducted a preliminary perceptual test to investigate this idea and found that just noticeable difference is reduced with two points of pressure compared to one, motivating future work using spatial summation in sensory prostheses.

翻译：包括截肢、糖尿病、中风及遗传性疾病在内的多种医学状况会导致触觉丧失。由于大多数感觉缺失类型缺乏药物或康复治疗手段，我们提出一种提供替代性反馈的触觉感知假体。手腕和前臂因具备可用皮肤面积且不遮挡手部而成为反馈的理想位置，但其机械感受器密度较指尖更低。以局部压力作为反馈模态，我们假设通过采用多点压力激发空间总和效应（即多点刺激引发的累积感知体验）可扩展刺激强度范围，从而改进现有设备。我们通过初步感知实验验证了这一构想，发现双点压力相较于单点压力可降低最小可觉差，这为未来在感知假体中应用空间总和效应提供了研究依据。