Independent Study on Haptics

I’ve always been interested in how user interfaces work and how we, as humans, interact with them. During the summer of 2007, I asked my advisor, Dr. Jose C. Principe, if I could do an independent study on haptic interfaces and how they work. Over the course of the semester, it became clear that, in order to best understand how haptic interfaces work, it was necessary to have a good idea of how the somatosensory system acquires and relays information within the human body. At the end of the summer, I submitted a short paper on my understanding of the somatosensory system, as well as a quick analysis of some of the more prevalent haptic technologies I found.