Sensory Characteristics of Temperature and its Discrimination in the Human Palm

In this study, we focused on the rarely utilized temperature sense, and examined the sensory characteristics of temperature in order to develop an interface device that utilizes the distribution of temperature in the palm. First, we evaluated the sensory characteristics of temperature in a part of the palm. Moreover, we investigated the relationship between the distance of two-point temperature stimuli and the identification characteristics based on the sensory characteristics of temperature in a part of the palm. For this experiment, we obtained the knowledge regarding the relationship between temperature and sense of temperature. Moreover, the results suggest that the discrimination rate improves when the distance between the two-point temperature stimuli is more than 20mm. From this study, we were able to ascertain the knowledge required for developing an interface that utilizes the distribution of temperature in the palm.