Haptic Situational Awareness Using Continuous Vibrotactile Sensations
This work aims to develop a viable haptic display for vehicle drivers, aircraft pilots, and ground navigators to guide them in situations where visual or auditory senses are degraded or overloaded, representing an incremental improvement in assistive technology.
The researchers tackled the problem of enhancing human situational awareness when visual or auditory senses are degraded by developing a torso-mounted haptic display that uses continuous vibrotactile sensations to provide directional cues. Experimental results showed that vibrotactile sensations enabled enhanced situational awareness during sensory distraction compared to visual-audio cues.
In this research, we have developed a haptic situational awareness device that presents users with directional cues through continuous vibrotactile sensations. Using the device, we present user studies on the effectiveness of a torso-mounted haptic display in enhancing human situational awareness, when visual/auditory senses are degraded. A haptic display has been developed which generates continuous cues using tactile illusions and programmed to generate navigation commands. Participants are given navigation tasks where they may receive commands through any of the seven sensory modality combinations vibrotactile only, visual only, audio only, visual+vibrotactile, visual+audio, vibrotactile+audio and vibrotactile+audio+visual. Experimental results on human volunteers show that vibrotactile sensations enable enhanced situational awareness during sensory distraction as compared to visual-audio cues. This work is aimed at developing a viable haptic display for vehicle drivers, aircraft pilots and humans performing ground navigation, which can guide the wearer in situations when their visual/auditory senses may be degraded/overloaded.