Tactile and Thermal Displays: Information Transfer Through the Skin

Prof. Lynette Jones is a Senior Research Scientist at Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT-Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Currently, she is Editor-in-chief for IEEE Transactions on Haptics.

Her main research interests are focused on understanding how the skin senses the environment and determining how it can be used effectively as a medium of communication. Her work on tactile displays includes research on characterizing the properties of different actuators used in displays, building and testing different types of tactile displays, evaluating the mechanical properties of skin so as to quantify its responses to vibration and perceptual studies with human subjects in which their responses to mechanical stimulation of the skin are measured.

Related to this work is the research on thermal displays in which the team led by Prof. Jones is developing thermal models that characterize the interaction between the hand and an object, building and testing thermal displays and conducting psychophysical and physiological studies with human subjects to assess the validity of the thermal models implemented in the displays.

The final area of research is focused on human hand function and analyses of the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in sensing object properties.