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About

Mor Farajian is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of haptics, human perception, and robot-assisted surgery. Her primary research focus is on restoring the sense of touch in minimally invasive surgical procedures, specifically investigating how artificial tactile feedback can improve a surgeon’s ability to perceive tissue stiffness and control grip forces. Farajian’s most cited work (2022, 10 citations) explores how combining kinesthetic and artificial tactile noise can enhance stiffness perception during robot-assisted surgeries, a critical step toward restoring the haptic feedback lost in current systems. Her earlier foundational study (2017, 8 citations) demonstrated a striking finding: stretching the skin on the fingertip creates both a perceptual and motor illusion of touching a harder spring, revealing the powerful role of tactile cues in shaping our interaction with objects. More recently (2023), she has shown that the direction of artificial skin-stretch relative to kinesthetic forces produces distinct effects on both stiffness perception and grip force control. Farajian’s work is notable for bridging fundamental neuroscience with practical surgical applications, offering concrete pathways to make robot-assisted surgeries safer and more intuitive by restoring the sense of touch.