A novel approach to the manipulation of body-parts ownership using a bilateral master-slave system

This paper introduces a novel approach to the manipulation of body-parts ownership, using the tactile rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm. In the conventional studies on the RHI, participant´s invisible hand and the visible rubber hand are manually tapped or stroked by an experimenter. Differently, in our approach, a bilateral master-slave system is applied to provide tactile stimulations in a novel interactive manner—active self-touch. Here, we present a 3-DOF master-slave system based on human self-touch characteristics and a validation experiment using an arranged version of the conventional RHI paradigm. In this new version, participants can contact with the rubber hand by manipulating the master device with their right hand and actively touch their own left hand through the slave device. The results demonstrate that the master-slave system can be successfully used to manipulate body-parts ownership, opening up the way to new studies concerning self-touch and body representation.