We propose Touch me Gently, a wearable forearm augmentation that enables the recreation of natural touch sensation by applying shear-forces onto the skin. In contrast to previous approaches, we arrange light-weight and stretchable 3×3cm plasters in a matrix onto the skin. Individual plasters were embedded with lines of shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires to generate shear-forces. Our design is informed by a series of studies investigating the perceptibility of different sizes, spacings, and attachments of plasters on the forearm. Our matrix arrangement enables the illusion of touches, for instance, feeling ones wrist being grabbed or the arm being stroked.

Suranga Nanayakkara is an Associate Professor at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, the University of Auckland (UoA). Before joining UoA, Suranga was an Assistant Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Fluid Interfaces group, MIT Media Lab. He received his PhD in 2010 and BEng in 2005 from the National University of Singapore. In 2011, he founded the "Augmented Human Lab" to explore ways of creating ‘enabling’ human-computer interfaces as natural extensions of our body, mind and behaviour.

His work is most important to the people whose lives it most directly impacts: those who face challenged to function in the world due to sensory deficits in hearing or vision. What also makes Suranga’s contributions important is that they are not only applicable to those specific communities. Because of his emphasis on “enabling” rather than “fixing,” the technologies that Suranga has developed have a potentially much broader range of applications. With publications in prestigious conferences, demonstrations, patents, media coverage and real-world deployments, Suranga has demonstrated the potential of advancing the state-of-the art in Assistive Human-Computer Interfaces. For the totality and breadth of achievements, he has won many awards including young inventor under 35 (TR35 award) in the Asia Pacific region by MIT TechReview, Outstanding Young Persons of Sri Lanka (TOYP), and INK Fellowship 2016.

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