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Effect of fingerprints orientation on skin vibrations during tactile exploration of textured surfaces

Alexis Prevost, Julien Scheibert and Georges Debrégeas

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In humans, the tactile perception of fine textures is mediated by skin vibrations when scanning the surface with the fingertip. These vibrations are encoded by specific mechanoreceptors, Pacinian corpuscules (PCs), located about 2mm below the skin surface. In a recent article, we performed experiments using a biomimetic sensor which suggest that fingerprints (epidermal ridges) may play an important role in shaping the subcutaneous stress vibrations in a way which facilitates their processing by the PC channel. Here we further test this hypothesis by directly recording the modulations of the fingerpad/substrate friction force induced by scanning an actual fingertip across a textured surface. When the fingerprints are oriented perpendicular to the scanning direction, the spectrum of these modulations shows a pronounced maximum around the frequency v/λ, where v is the scanning velocity and λ the fingerprints period. This simple biomechanical result confirms the relevance of our previous finding for human touch.

Scheibert J, Leurent S, Prevost A, Debrégeas G. The role of fingerprints in the coding of tactile information probed with a biomimetic sensor. Science 2009; 323:1503-1506.

Authors

Alexis Prevost Corresponding author: alexis.prevost@lps.ens.fr

Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, ENS, UPMC, CNRS; Paris, France

Julien Scheibert

Physics of Geological Processes, University of Oslo; Oslo, Norway

Georges Debrégeas

Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, ENS, UPMC, CNRS; Paris, France

This is an open-access article

 Download PDF

If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.