Device's Informed Touch Can Tell You Where to Go
Watch this video to learn more about a Rice University-developed wearable, textile-based device that could help declutter, enhance, and, in the case of impairments, compensate for deficiencies in visual and auditory inputs by tapping the sense of touch.
“With a traditional control system using voltage and current, you’d typically need many electronic inputs to achieve complex haptic cues,” said Daniel Preston , an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice whose lab explores the intersection of energy, materials and fluids. “In this device, we’ve offloaded a lot of that complexity to the fluidic controller and require only a very limited number of electronic inputs to provide sophisticated haptic stimulation.”
Transcript
00:00:01 We call these point force cues. and so what that essentially means is it feels almost like a tap as each pouch inflates across the forearm. We developed haptic, wearable textiles. People have been looking at embedding haptics, which is this idea of using the sensation of touch to convey information in wearables and textiles in prior work. But we've gone a step farther with this work by essentially offloading a lot of the control responsive abilities to within the textile sheets themselves. using pressurized air instead of electronics.
00:00:34 In some of our prior work we’ve shown the benefit of creating wearable haptic devices that can convey cues along the arm. And we do this to provide directional guidance or just to enrich a haptic experience. But we're always constrained to take these off the shelf technologies and and build them into something wearable that might be rigid or uncomfortable to the user. So with these textile based systems, it's really just like a piece of clothing. It's very comfortable. And the haptic cues are created organically, like within the materials that are used.
00:01:07 And we can create a wide range of different haptic experiences by manipulating the design parameters of the device. So we have quite a few populations that could really benefit from these haptic textiles. The first and foremost would be the over a billion people with a loss of vision and another billion people with the loss of hearing. They can benefit greatly from the third sense of communication through the sense of touch. Additionally, we can enhance various avenues of entertainment, such as gaming, music, movies, augmented or virtual reality
00:01:39 by incorporating haptic touch. We first determine the efficacy of the system in the lab where we got some really nice results, almost 90% accuracy for all responders on average. We then took it to the streets of Houston where we allowed a user to navigate nearly a mile, both on foot and then also riding on a scooter where their hands were occupied. But the haptic cues that helped them navigate were delivered through the wearable. This is another aspect of the, of the textile approach to making wearable devices that's really exciting is the speed
00:02:11 and the rapid fabrication and prototyping that you can do. So you can really iterate ideas quickly and almost, you know, brainstorm in the lab with the devices that you can fabricate. So it's really just limited by your imagination.