Haptic Situational Awareness Using Continuous Vibrotactile Sensations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a haptic device that uses continuous vibrotactile cues to improve situational awareness during sensory overload, demonstrating its effectiveness through user studies in navigation tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel torso-mounted haptic display that generates continuous cues using tactile illusions, enhancing awareness when visual and auditory senses are compromised.

Findings

Vibrotactile cues improve situational awareness under sensory distraction.

The device effectively guides users in navigation tasks.

Vibrotactile sensations outperform visual-audio cues in certain conditions.

Abstract

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.