Enhancing Multi-Sensory Cue Salience and Perceptual Identification in a Wearable Haptic Device

Abstract

Wearable haptic devices increasingly incorporate a variety of cutaneous haptic cues, enabling the creation of multi-sensory stimuli that can encode complex information. In prior work, a multi-sensory wearable device comprised of squeeze, skin stretch, and vibrotactile cues called MISSIVE was shown to be effective at encoding large cue sets; however, skin stretch was often misinterpreted when presented with a simultaneous squeeze cue. In this paper, we present the design of a multi-sensory haptic wearable named MISSIVE-2 that foregoes skin stretch in favor of a larger set of vibrotactile cues that can be presented with or without a simultaneous squeeze cue. We evaluated cue identification accuracy in a human-subject study and demonstrate very good performance in both true positive rate (84.0%) and positive predictive value (86.2%), objective measures of perceptual performance, with MISSIVE-2, especially compared to that observed with the original MISSIVE device. Analysis of the confusion matrix of all forty haptic cues revealed that user errors were most likely to occur for vibration cues presented at the top of the wrist, under a module housing control electronics, and in the presence of a simultaneous squeeze cue, though performance was still much improved compared to that with MISSIVE. These findings suggest that users can reliably perceive multi-sensory cues presented with MISSIVE-2. Future work will explore applications of MISSIVE-2 for haptic communication.