Vibrotactile Pattern Recognition: A Portable Compact Tactile Matrix

Compact tactile matrix (CTM) is a vibrotactile device composed of a seven-by-seven array of electromechanical vibrators “tactip” used to represent tactile patterns applied to a small skin area. The CTM uses a dynamic feature to generate spatiotemporal tactile patterns. The design requirements focus particularly on maximizing the transmission of the vibration from one tactip to the others as well as to the skin over a square area of 16 cm² while simultaneously minimizing the transmission of vibrations throughout the overall structure of the CTM. Experiments were conducted on 22 unpracticed subjects to evaluate how the CTM could be used to develop a tactile semantics for communication of instructions in order to test the ability of the subjects to identify: (1) directional prescriptors for gesture guidance and (2) instructional commands for operational task requirements in a military context. The results indicate that, after familiarization, recognition accuracies in the tactile patterns were remarkably precise for more 80% of the subjects.