Application Design Framework for a Dressed-up Touchscreen with a Tactile Feedback

Abstract

It is difficult for persons who are unfamiliar with a touchscreen like elderly or handicapped people to operate the electronic products employing touchscreen as user interface. We aim to realize a touchscreen that can provide the position of buttons and click feeling by a simple mechanism, keeping the flexibility of the touch screen with arbitrary buttons and background. The proposed touchscreen consists of a switch underneath an LCD panel and the plates with identification number at the top of the LCD panel. When the touchscreen is pushed, the switch underneath the LCD module is also pressed. Thus, the user can get certain click feeling by the switch. For the plate put on the top of the LCD module, the places where icons are displayed in the touchscreen are hollowed out. Therefore, the edges around the buttons on the hollowed part give the user's finger unevenness. That is, the position and boundaries of the icons can be recognized by the finger. In addition, since the type of the plate can be determined by the ID, a variety of button arrangement according to the plate used can be provided. In order to make our touchscreen widely used, a generic design framework of software is needed. Thus, this paper shows a general framework of software design. Through a case study on the prototype, we demonstrate that the application can be developed actually by following our design framework.

An Implementation of Application Design Framework for a Dressed-up Touchscreen with a Tactile Feedback

“…Therefore, we aim for the realization of the touchscreen that can provide the click feeling and the position of the button by a simple mechanism keeping the flexibility of the touchscreen (4)(5). To be spread the welfare systems employing our proposal, providing a generic shared developing environment over applications is required.…”

“…The developing environment must be a simple mechanism and less dependence to the device. We have proposed the hardware framework with a simple structure [4]． In addition, we have described a concept of the general software framework on this hardware framework [5]． However, since the software framework was a conceptual image, we need further examination to practice implementing the many features that are independent on the specified devices. For example, these features are the user interface and the switching of the application.…”