Skin Reading: Encoding Text In A 6-Channel Haptic Display

This paper investigates the communication of natural language messages using a wearable haptic display. Our research spans both the design of the haptic display, as well as the methods for communication that use it. First, three wearable configurations are proposed basing on haptic perception fundamentals. To encode symbols, we devise an overlapping spatiotemporal stimulation (OST) method, that distributes stimuli spatially and temporally with a minima gap. An empirical study shows that, compared with spatial stimulation, OST is preferred in terms of recall. Second, we propose an encoding for the entire English alphabet and a training method for letters, words and phrases. A second study investigates communication accuracy. It puts four participants through five sessions, for an overall training time of approximately 5 hours per participant. Results reveal that after one hour of training, participants were able to discern 16 letters, and identify two- and three-letter words. They could discern the full English alphabet (26 letters, 92% accuracy) after approximately three hours of training, and after five hours participants were able to interpret words transmitted at an average duration of 0.6s per word.