A Comparative Analysis of Smartphone and Standard Tools for Touch Perception Assessment Across Multiple Body Sites

Tactile perception plays an important role in activities of daily living, and it can be impaired in individuals with medical conditions. The most common tools used to assess tactile sensation, the Semmes-Weinstein monofilaments and the 128 Hz tuning fork, have poor repeatability and resolution. Long term, we aim to provide a repeatable, high-resolution testing platform that can be used to assess vibrotactile perception through smartphones without the need for an experimenter to be present to conduct the test. We present a smartphone-based vibration perception measurement platform and compare its performance to measurements from standard monofilament and tuning fork tests. We conducted a user study with 36 healthy adults in which we tested each tool on the hand, wrist, and foot, to assess how well our smartphone-based vibration perception thresholds (VPTs) detect known trends obtained from standard tests. The smartphone platform detected statistically significant changes in VPT between the index finger and the foot and also between the feet of younger adults and older adults. Our smartphone-based VPT had a moderate correlation to tuning fork-based VPT. A long-term objective of this work is to develop an accessible smartphone-based platform that can be used to measure disease progression and regression.