Vibrotactile Glove guidance for semi-autonomous wheelchair operations

This paper describes the use of a tactile display, the Vibratactile Glove, which provides a wheelchair user who has severe visual impairment with essential information to operate a powered wheelchair, such as directions and spatial representation. In the absence of visual information, the user receives a series of vibration signals that indicate obstacles or desired directions in the environment. The vibration signals are conducted to the operator's skin through a 3-by-3 array of vibrating elements (also known as vibrotactor). The vibrotactor array is placed inside of a glove so as to face the back side of the hand. Using the vibrotactor array, sequences of aligned stimuli indicating directional guidance (vertical, horizontal, and diagonal) and points of stimuli indicating obstacles (vibration of any of eight periphery tactors) are generated. The haptic sensitivity of stimuli localization is reinforced by signal repetition with short inter-stimuli period. The preliminary results ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACMSE
• Authors: Hajime Uchiyama, Michael A. Covington, Walter D. Potter
• Keywords: ACMSE 2008, Severe Visual Impairment, Tactile Display, Theoretical Computer Science, Vibration Signals