Here is an interesting report on amplifying touch
sensitivity, the amount of noisy current (2 milliamps)
is awfully small and the first thing that sprung to my
mind was as a means to upgrade the detection threshold
for radionics.
It is after all, claimed to feel like a sticky or
tacky sensation while others report it as a peach fuzz
sensation.
The only thing that might negate this is a loss of
'tune' since in radionics, the persons body becomes
part of the circuit and it might not work...if it does
though, the reliability might be enhanced.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1998/split/pnu387-1.htm
ELECTRIC NOISE CAN INCREASE HUMAN TACTILE SENSATION of
mechanical forces, new experiments have shown, opening
possibilities for electric devices that can enhance
sensitivity to touch in the elderly, stroke patients,
and people with diabetes.
Researchers in Massachusetts (contact Jim Collins or
Kris Richardson, Boston University, 617-353-0390)
applied a small mechanical force to the finger pads of
11 young, healthy subjects.
The force was ordinarily too weak for the subjects to
detect, with a magnitude of approximately 0.01
Newtons, roughly equivalent to pressing a pencil tip
onto the finger very lightly.
However, when the researchers applied this force along
with 2 milliamps' worth of randomly fluctuating
electrical current through the fingerpad, 9 of the 11
subjects then reported detecting the mechanical
stimulus---without feeling the electric current.
The researchers speculate that the electrical noise
helped nerve cells in the finger pad to reach their
threshold for firing a signal through the nervous
system.
Moreover, they observed that the 2 milliamps of
electrical noise appeared to maximize the
detectability of the stimulus--suggesting evidence for
the phenomenon of "stochastic resonance" (Updates 121
and 293).
Although a previous experiment provided evidence for
stochastic resonance in tactile sensation of
mechanical forces--by using random mechanical
vibrations as the noise--this is the first human
experiment in which the signal and noise were from
different kinds of sources.
(Richardson et al., Chaos, September 1998; this paper
is available in PDF format--free PDF reader available
at Adobe Acrobat web site.)
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