Haptics for Human Augmentation

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to submit to our special issue on haptic technology for human augmentation. Haptics is an interdisciplinary field exploring the science of touch and technology. While still in its infancy, tremendous interest, advancement, and commercial potential has been seen within the last decade. At the same time, interest in human augmentation, or expansion of our senses and abilities, has grown. It is therefore timely to explore the intersection of haptics and human augmentation. Preliminary explorations include vibrotactile compass belts that give users a new “sense” of direction; soft “muscles” that increase strength and reduce fatigue; and electrotactile devices that build new balance systems in the brain for those with vestibular damage. While much effort for human augmentation has been applied toward rehabilitative and assistive purposes, augmentation need not restrict itself to disability; instead, when viewed in the general sense as “augmenting human ability”, haptic technology is applicable in a broader range of areas. If we consider ability as a spectrum, haptic technology for human augmentation provides gains in ability regardless of where a user falls within this spectrum, whether we are enhancing “disability” to “ability”, or “ability” to “super-ability”. This special issue invites contributions in areas of haptic sensory substitution/augmentation; haptic assistive technology for sensory, physical, or cognitive impairments; haptic rehabilitative technology including new devices for neurorehabilitation; haptic healthcare technology including surgical simulators and devices for personal health and wellbeing; haptic gerontechnology for the aging population; haptic human-computer interaction; multimedia that engages the sense of touch including virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality; multimodal interaction between the sense of touch and our other senses; as well as user studies, including psychological and psychophysical studies, that make fundamental contributions toward realizing haptic technology for human augmentation.

Dr. Troy McDaniel
Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan
Dr. Ramin Tadayon
Dr. Yuichi Kurita
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.