Heterogeneous Stroke: Using Unique Vibration Cues to Improve the Wrist-Worn Spatiotemporal Tactile Display

TL;DR

This paper introduces Heterogeneous Stroke, a novel vibrotactile design for wrist-worn displays that significantly enhances recognition accuracy of complex tactile patterns across various arm postures.

Contribution

It proposes a new vibrotactile stimulus assignment method to reduce confusion between tactors, improving recognition accuracy in wrist-worn tactile displays.

Findings

Achieved 93.8% accuracy for alphabets

Achieved 92.4% accuracy for digits

Effective across different arm postures

Abstract

Beyond a simple notification of incoming calls or messages, more complex information such as alphabets and digits can be delivered through spatiotemporal tactile patterns (STPs) on a wrist-worn tactile display (WTD) with multiple tactors. However, owing to the limited skin area and spatial acuity of the wrist, frequent confusions occur between closely located tactors, resulting in a low recognition accuracy. Furthermore, the accuracies reported in previous studies have mostly been measured for a specific posture and could further decrease with free arm postures in real life. Herein, we present Heterogeneous Stroke, a design concept for improving the recognition accuracy of STPs on a WTD. By assigning unique vibrotactile stimuli to each tactor, the confusion between tactors can be reduced. Through our implementation of Heterogeneous Stroke, the alphanumeric characters could be delivered with high accuracy (93.8% for 26 alphabets and 92.4% for 10 digits) across different arm postures.