EIT-Based Tactile Sensing Patches for Rehabilitation and Human Machine Interaction

We present the development of an innovative stretchable tac- tile sensor based on electrical impedance tomography (EIT) for appli- cations in wearable robotics and rehabilitation. To extract the tactile information we exploit the electrical impedance tomography technique to reconstruct the local conductivity changes of a piezoresistive fabric. The EIT method poses several new challenges in the reconstruction, counterbalanced by the overcoming of many of the drawbacks of the cur- rent tactile sensors. Results obtained are preliminary but encouraging and we believe that the combination of the EIT method with advanced machine learning techniques will enable reliable wearable tactile sensing.