A Psychophysical Dataset for Vibrotactile Augmented Perception

Why Feeling Vibrations Matters

When you pick up a cup or feel your phone buzz, your sense of touch quietly guides every move. For people who use artificial limbs or need help navigating the world, restoring some of that touch could be life-changing. This paper introduces a rich new dataset about how people feel vibrations on their skin. It is designed to help engineers and scientists build better wearable devices that “talk” to the body through gentle buzzing, potentially improving prosthetic hands, balance aids, and navigation tools for people with vision loss.

A Belt That Talks to the Body

The researchers built a simple-looking but carefully designed vibration belt with five tiny motors arranged across the abdomen. By turning these motors on alone or in pairs and by changing how strongly they vibrated, the team created 51 distinct vibration patterns. Forty healthy adults wore the belt in two separate sessions spaced days or weeks apart. In each session, they went through 255 trials, feeling one pattern at a time and then reporting where on the abdomen they sensed the vibration and how strong it felt, along with how confident they were in their answers and how long they took to decide.

Turning Sensations into Data

To capture people’s experiences in a precise but intuitive way, the team used a half-circle on a computer screen to stand in for the front of the abdomen. Participants clicked on this half-circle to show the perceived location and strength of each vibration, with position mapped to angle and strength mapped to distance from the center. They also rated their confidence and then filled out a questionnaire about fatigue, mental effort, and how well they thought the vibrations conveyed information. All of this, plus trial times, was stored in a structured way so that later analysis could follow how people sensed and decided, moment by moment, across hundreds of vibrations.

Who Took Part and What Was Measured

The study involved 20 women and 20 men, with ages, heights, and weights similar to typical adults in Iran. For each person, the researchers recorded basic body measurements and then went further, using a body composition test to estimate muscle, fat, water, and related indicators. They also customized the belt for each participant, first finding the faintest vibration each motor needed to produce to be felt, and then defining low, medium, and high levels around that point. This careful setup helps later users of the dataset explore how body type and individual sensitivity might shape how people perceive vibrations.

From Raw Clicks to a Clean Resource

Behind the scenes, the team spent considerable effort turning raw recordings into a polished dataset. Every click on the half-circle was converted from screen pixels into angles and distances, then normalized so different screens and setups would not affect results. A small number of clicks that landed just outside the half-circle were gently corrected back to its edge to keep the geometry consistent. Personal details such as names and exact dates were removed, and participant identifiers were shuffled to protect privacy. The final collection, stored in easy-to-use spreadsheet files, includes calibration results, trial-by-trial responses, questionnaires, and participant information, all ready for analysis.

How Reliable Are These Vibrations?

The authors carefully checked whether their data hold up over time and across people. They compared results from the two sessions and found similar patterns in where participants clicked, how long they took to respond, and how confident they felt, suggesting that people’s responses were stable rather than random. The spread of answers also showed natural symmetry across the body, and participants with similar vibration patterns tended to have similar response times and confidence levels. Together, these checks indicate that the dataset is both consistent and representative, making it a solid foundation for future work.

What This Means for Future Touch Technology

At its core, this paper does not present a finished gadget but a powerful toolbox for others. By making a large, well-documented dataset about vibrotactile perception openly available, the authors give researchers the raw material to build and test models of how people feel vibrations, how those feelings vary from person to person, and how best to encode information through touch. In the long run, this knowledge can help designers create more natural, informative vibration patterns for prosthetic limbs, navigation belts, warning vests, and many other assistive devices—bringing a more intuitive sense of touch back into technologies that interact with the human body.

Citation: Hamidifard, M., Nikfarjad, S., Pirmohammadi, H. et al. A Psychophysical Dataset for Vibrotactile Augmented Perception. Sci Data 13, 474 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06843-x

Keywords: vibrotactile feedback, tactile perception, prosthetic sensory feedback, haptic interfaces, human-robot interaction