Improving recognition accuracy of wrist-worn spatiotemporal tactile display using heterogeneous vibrotactile stimuli

Abstract

Since smartwatches have been popularized in the market, a wrist-worn tactile display(WTD) can be an attractive option for tactile interaction. Along with this, previous studies proposed spatiotemporal tactile pattern(STP) to deliver more expressive information such as alphabets and digits. However, due to the limited space and bandwidth of human tactile perception, recognition accuracy has been largely limited. Furthermore, most of the previous studies evaluated the accuracy in a single arm posture. Thus, the usability in various postures which can be taken in everyday life has not been proven enough. In this paper, we propose a concept of Heterogeneous STP that utilizes mutually distinctive heterogeneous vibrotactile stimuli to improve the accuracy in various postures. Through the user study, we showed that the proposed solution(73%) improved the accuracy to more than twice compared to the existing method(34%).