SkinSource: A Data-Driven Toolbox for Predicting Touch-Elicited Vibrations in the Upper Limb

Vibrations transmitted throughout the hand and arm during touch contact play a central role in haptic science and engineering but are challenging to model or experimentally characterize. Here, we present SkinSource, a data-driven toolbox for predicting skin vibrations across the upper limb in response to user-specified input forces. The toolbox leverages impulse response measurements that encode the physics of vibration transmission across the hands and arms of four participants and provides software tools for analyzing the predicted skin responses. We show that the SkinSource predictions closely match experimental measurements and confirm the underlying assumption of linear vibration transmission in the skin. We also demonstrate through several usage examples how SkinSource can act as a versatile computational platform for haptic research applications, such as characterizing vibrotactile transmission in the skin, engineering haptic interfaces, and investigating touch perception.