Predicting Sensory and Affective Tactile Perception from Physical Parameters Obtained by Using a Biomimetic Multimodal Tactile Sensor

Tactile perception plays a crucial role in the perception of products and consumer preferences. This perception process is structured in hierarchical layers comprising a sensory layer (soft and smooth) and an affective layer (comfort and luxury). In this study, we attempted to predict the evaluation score of sensory and affective tactile perceptions of materials using a biomimetic multimodal tactile sensor that mimics the active touch behavior of humans and measures physical parameters such as force, vibration, and temperature. We conducted sensory and affective descriptor evaluations on 32 materials, including cosmetics, textiles, and leather. Using the physical parameters obtained by the biomimetic multimodal tactile sensor as explanatory variables, we predicted the scores of the sensory and affective descriptors in 10 regression models. The bagging regressor demonstrated the best performance, achieving a coefficient of determination (<i>R</i>²) of >0.6 for fourteen of nineteen sensory and eight of twelve affective descriptors. The present model exhibited particularly high prediction accuracy for sensory descriptors such as “moist” and “elastic”, and for affective descriptors such as “pleasant” and “like”. These findings suggest a method to support efficient tactile design in product development across various industries by predicting tactile descriptor scores using physical parameters from a biomimetic tactile sensor.