An Analysis of Static, Dynamic, and Saltatory Vibrotactile Stimuli to Inform the Design of Efficient Haptic Communication Systems

Informing the Use of Vibrotactile Feedback for Information Communication

“…In addition to the aforementioned moderator variables, we also considered the potential moderator effect of the complexity of the task performed by subjects to make responses. However, we found that almost all the candidate studies had simple tasks for making responses (subjects only need to simply click a button or to orally identify the information represented by vibrations) which yielded response times ranging from 0.6 to 3.0 seconds, while only one of the candidate studies (Roady & Ferris, 2012) had more complicate response tasks (subjects need to manually draw the vibrationcoded patterns on paper using a pen) that resulted in longer response times of approximately 4.6 seconds on average. As a result, the sample size of complexity response task was too small from a statistics aspect.…”

“…Researchers have taken both the on/off status and the physical location of one or multiple vibrotactile stimuli to indicate spatial information, e.g. navigation direction, direction of a movement, and physical location of an item (as in Bial, Alt, Kern, & Schmidt, 2011;Chang, Hwang, & Ji, 2011;Ferris, Hameed, Penfold, & Rao, 2007;Fitch Kiefer, Hankey, & Kleiner, 2007;Ho, Tan, & Spence, 2005;Kohli, Yanagida, Niwa, & Lindeman, 2011;McDaniel, Goldberg, Villanueva, Viswanathan, & Panchanathan, 2011;Roady & Ferris, 2012;Salzer, Oron-Gilad, Ronen, & Parmet, 2011;Salzer & Oron-Gilad, 2012;Terrence, Brill, & Gilson, 2005). For this application, users need not only to detect the vibrotactile feedback, but also to determine the location where the vibration source is placed when the vibration is activated.…”

Head-Mounted Sensory Augmentation Device: Designing a Tactile Language

“…For instance, it is well-known that when two nearby positions on the skin are stimulated sequentially people may perceive this as apparent motion-the illusary sensation of a stimulus travelling continuously from the first stimulation site to the second [23], [24]-with the strength of this effect depending on various factors including stimulus timing and the distance between the stimulation positions (see section 2). Roady et al [25] compared the effectiveness of static (single or multiple tactors activated together), dynamic (tactors activated in sequence but no temporal overlap), and saltatory (overlapping sequential stimuli) vibrotactile patterns in a task in which participants were asked to draw the stimulation pattern using pen and paper. Results showed that saltatory presentation mode, which induced an apparent motion effect, outperformed dynamic display in terms of response time and accuracy, and was easier to interpret than static displays for more complex patterns.…”

Supporting Speeded Navigational Communication via Gesture-Controlled Vibrotactile Displays

“…The lack of significance suggests that the effects of accuracy were not the result of a speed-accuracy tradeoff. Further task complexity and information density would likely have made the measure of run time more sensitive to the different communication methods, as previous studies have shown that signal complexity affects the relative benefits of tactile display (e.g., Ferris & Sarter, 2011;Roady & Ferris, 2012).…”

“…For this task, instructions were limited to binary ("left"/"right") directions so that the first test of this system was with a very basic instruction set. This decision was also driven by previous research which demonstrated that simpler directional vibration patterns are interpreted faster and more accurately than more complex signals (Roady & Ferris, 2012).…”