Haptic perception by metabolic, toxic and/or immunologic factors. Examples of medical conditions that can cause neuropathies are diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, thyroid dysfunction (hyper- and hypothyroidism) as well as hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and alcohol dependency. Loss of the sense of touch is a catastrophic deficit that can impair walking and other skilled actions such as holding objects or using tools. Immersive environments can recreate the feeling of haptic interaction. Exoskeletal gloves such as the Exo-Skin Soft Haptic exoskeletal interface, developed at Drexel University, can be programmed to take a patient through a program of physical therapy exercises to retrain muscles and
Haptic memory stimuli. According to a study done by Bruce V. DiMattia, Keith A. Posley and Joaquin M. Fuster, it was found that monkeys were quite capable of concurrent Visual-to-Haptic as well as Haptic-to-Visual crossmodal matching of objects by size, shape and texture. It was also discovered that they were more adept at performing cross modal matching in the Visual-to-Haptic direction. Memory is important in infancy as it forms the basis for more complex procedures such as learning and reasoning. Studies of haptic memory in infants is particularly useful because it allows researchers to study the more perceptual representation of information as