The today mainly incorporated sensory modalities vision and hearing are most often highly charged due to an increasing number, as well as a rising complexity of diversified assistance systems in vehicles. These systems, originally developed for "supporting" the driver in its tasks, increasingly directs to operation errors caused by cognitive overload. The sense of touch -as additional interaction channel -should have the ability to release cognitive load from visual and auditory channels by adapting in a natural, intuitive and non-distracting manner.A drawback of haptics is that feedback is reliant to both driver-and environmental conditions. For instance, different sizes and weights of drivers' result in a changed haptic perceptivity, and vibro-tactile feedback potentially is interpreted erroneous due to personal sitting attitudes.A vibro-tactile seat, endowed with a set of unobtrusive embedded sensors and actuators, is proposed to counteract on these issues. The input channel is used for determining the occupied seating surface and, in addition, is also responsible for observing disruptive vibrations, originating in the environment. These information is employed in order to reconfigure vibro-tactile output dynamically with the aim to guarantee consistent haptic perception for any person.Keywords: Vibro-tactile Interaction, Tactile Sensing, Haptic Seat, Dynamic Feedback.
MotivationIt is evidenced that the majority of information in vehicles is delivered via the two sensory channels vision and hearing, e.g. in Toennis et al. [34]. Approximately 70% to 85% of all sensory input is received via the eyes, 10% to 15% with the ears and about 10% or less as touch sensations via the skin (Mauter et al. (i) A steadily rising number of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), combined with an increase in operation complexity, directs to high cognitive load for the driving person, in particular when using only eyes and ears for information reception. Subsequently this can result in operation errors and casualties caused by overlooking information or fail to hear some messages.(ii) The visual sense is often affected from factors like reflecting sun, changing light conditions when driving through a road tunnel (or more general different dayand night-vision capabilities), poor sight on foggy days or bad weather, etc. A second issue is the span of time required for the accommodation of the eye. Changing the focus from far (the road) to near (the dashboard) takes some time, and particulary older drivers are strongly affected from the task of focussing [20]. Cardullo [3] reported that vision is affected in highacceleration environments and that the result leads to performance degradation.(iii) Auditory feedback could be easily overheard and is rather quickly felt as annoying (e.g. the indicator for fastening the seat belt). Moreover, most driving situations are characterized by ambient, distracting noise originating from (i) the engine or environment, (ii) communication between passengers, (iii) cell phone conversation...