A computational 2D model simulating the neural responses of a single tactile unit to vibrotactile stimuli

This study presents a computational model that simulates the responses of tactile afferents, which are essential for designing tactile devices in addition to understanding the mechanism of tactile perception of vibrotactile stimuli. We employed finite element method analysis to simulate skin deformation accurately, and the leaky integrate-and-fire model to simulate the neural dynamics of tactile afferents. Previous studies using these models have failed to model the responses of tactile afferents to vibrotactile stimuli; therefore, we developed a computational model that can better reproduce the neural responses to vibrotactile stimuli, considering the appropriate filters. We subsequently validated this model by calculating the firing rates of tactile afferents in response to several vibrotactile stimuli. Our proposed computational model outperformed conventional models when evaluated using the averaged root mean square error. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential of our method to model the activities of tactile afferents and will provide insights into the development of not only computational neural models but also tactile devices.