A Tactile Seat for Direction Coding in Car Driving: Field Evaluation

Abstract

This in-traffic, field study examined the merit of using a car seat instrumented with tactile stimulation elements (tactors) to communicate directional information to a driver. A car seat fitted with an 8 times 8 matrix of tactors embedded in the seat pan was used to code eight different directions (the four cardinal and four oblique directions). With this seat mounted in a car, a field study was conducted under both smooth road and brick road vibratory conditions. The primary performance measures were directional accuracy and reaction time, measured under both alerted and simulated surprise conditions. Overall, the results show that the tactile chair seat provides a promising and robust method of providing directional information. The percentage of correct directional responses was very high (92 percent of all trials), and incorrect responses were typically just one location segment (45 degrees) off.

Vibrotactile feedback in steering wheel reduces navigation errors during GPS-guided car driving

“…This result suggests that the subjects navigated better when vibrotactile cues were displayed to them in addition to the auditory ones (p < 0.001). These results support the earlier finding that a localized vibration coming from the driver seat is an intuitive way to present direction information in navigation [4]. We further analyzed the data to see if there was any difference between the experimental sessions and the groups (see Table 2).…”

“…The use of haptic feedback in vehicular settings is a relatively new concept and a review of the literature is available in [1,2]. There are studies showing the benefits of vibrotactile feedback in arousing sleepy drivers [2], alerting drivers to approaching danger [3], presenting more detailed navigational information [4], and reducing driver workload when interacting with in-vehicle devices, but we are not aware of any earlier study that aims to integrate vibrotactile feedback into a GPS-based car navigation system to improve the navigation performance of a driver. In [5], vibration motors were attached to the steering wheel of a driving simulator and the recognition rate of the drivers for the vibrotactile stimulus coded in spatio-temporal patterns was measured, but its application to a GPS-based navigation system has not been considered at all.…”

Tactile warning signals for in-vehicle systems

“…On the other hand, the sense of touch is commonly considered as being far less central to driving than either vision or audition; it is also relatively underutilized in driving tasks (Van Erp and Van Veen, 2004;Spence and Ho, 2008b;Hogema et al, 2009;Baldwin et al, 2012a,b). Since the skin represents the largest of our senses, having a surface area of approximately 1.8 m 2 and accounting for roughly 18% of our body mass (Montagu, 1971;Spence and Ho, 2008a;White, 2010), the sense of touch can be seen as providing a readily available channel for the presentation of warning (and other informational) signals to the driver without necessarily increasing their visual or auditory workload (Drew and Hayes, 2012;Prewett et al, 2012;Gallace and Spence, 2014).…”

An Active Safety System for Low-Speed Bus Braking Assistance

“…In general, the number of these incidents are reduced although there are 5 cases in which the ratio increases (individuals 6,11,12,17,18). However, in those cases the ratio of low risk incidents is higher, which implies that the haptic system was effective despite of the high number of incidents.…”

“…Once obstacles have been detected in the surroundings of the vehicle, haptic and audiovisual (HAV) warnings are produced to make the driver aware of the danger [17]- [20].…”