TY - GEN
T1 - The HapBack
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, HCII 2020
AU - Duarte, Bryan
AU - McDaniel, Troy
AU - Tadayon, Ramin
AU - Chowdhury, Abhik
AU - Low, Allison
AU - Panchanathan, Sethuraman
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation and Arizona State University for their funding support. This material is partially based upon work supported by the NSF under Grant No. 1828010.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - For the significant global population of individuals who are blind or visually impaired, spatial awareness during navigation remains a challenge. Tactile Electronic Travel Aids have been designed to assist with the provision of spatiotemporal information, but an intuitive method for mapping this information to patterns on a vibrotactile display remains to be determined. This paper explores the encoding of distance from a navigator to an object using two strategies: absolute and relative. A wearable prototype, the HapBack, is presented with two straps of vertically aligned vibrotactile motors mapped to five distances, with each distance mapped to a row on the display. Absolute patterns emit a single vibration at the row corresponding to a distance, while relative patterns emit a sequence of vibrations starting from the bottom row and ending at the row mapped to that distance. These two encoding strategies are comparatively evaluated for identification accuracy and perceived intuitiveness of mapping among ten adult participants who are blind or visually impaired. No significant difference was found between the intuitiveness of the two encodings based on these metrics, with each showing promising results for application during navigation tasks.
AB - For the significant global population of individuals who are blind or visually impaired, spatial awareness during navigation remains a challenge. Tactile Electronic Travel Aids have been designed to assist with the provision of spatiotemporal information, but an intuitive method for mapping this information to patterns on a vibrotactile display remains to be determined. This paper explores the encoding of distance from a navigator to an object using two strategies: absolute and relative. A wearable prototype, the HapBack, is presented with two straps of vertically aligned vibrotactile motors mapped to five distances, with each distance mapped to a row on the display. Absolute patterns emit a single vibration at the row corresponding to a distance, while relative patterns emit a sequence of vibrations starting from the bottom row and ending at the row mapped to that distance. These two encoding strategies are comparatively evaluated for identification accuracy and perceived intuitiveness of mapping among ten adult participants who are blind or visually impaired. No significant difference was found between the intuitiveness of the two encodings based on these metrics, with each showing promising results for application during navigation tasks.
KW - Nonvisual navigation
KW - Spatial awareness
KW - Wearable tactile display
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092151704&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85092151704&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-60149-2_20
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-60149-2_20
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85092151704
SN - 9783030601485
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 251
EP - 266
BT - HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Papers
A2 - Stephanidis, Constantine
A2 - Antona, Margherita
A2 - Gao, Qin
A2 - Zhou, Jia
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 19 July 2020 through 24 July 2020
ER -