Using tactile rhythm to convey interpersonal distances to individuals who are blind

Abstract

This paper presents a scheme for using tactile rhythms to convey interpersonal distance to individuals who are blind or visually impaired, with the goal of providing access to non-verbal cues during social interactions. A preliminary experiment revealed that subjects could identify the proposed tactile rhythms and found them intuitive for the given application. Future work aims to improve recognition results and increase the number of interpersonal distances conveyed by incorporating temporal change information into the proposed methodology.

Guiding Tourists through Haptic Interaction: Vibration Feedback in the Lund Time Machine

“…Our results agree with the designs used in [7,16], while they disagree with some of the mappings in [1,11]. In [11], shorter tactile stimuli are used at closer distances (opposite to our recommendation), while the recommendation for longer pulses agrees with two of the designs in [1].…”

“…Using a vibration motor one basically has two parameters that can be manipulated: pulse length and off time. In [7], a constant pulse length of 50ms is used, and the distance coding has shorter off times for closer distance. The work in [7] is focused on discrimination -the assumption that shorter off time maps to short distance is not tested.…”

“…In [7], a constant pulse length of 50ms is used, and the distance coding has shorter off times for closer distance. The work in [7] is focused on discrimination -the assumption that shorter off time maps to short distance is not tested. The same assumption is made in [16,17] where it is assumed that shorter pulses should be given nearer the goal (although it is also recognized that when one is far away and needs to select a new direction it is important to get pulses often enough).…”

“…The study designs were based on a pilot study with one participant who indicated that she got stronger sensations with fewer pulses (opposite to the designs in e.g. [7]). Thus all designs in [1] have few pulses at close distance.…”

Towards developing perceivable tactile feedback for mobile devices

“…The tactile channel was used by McDaniel et al (2009) to enhance human-human communication. The researchers designed a scheme for using tactile rhythms to convey interpersonal distance to individuals who are blind or visually impaired, with the goal of providing access to nonverbal cues during social interactions.…”