Mobile phone short message tacton notification based on mood and urgency

Tactile haptic support on mobile phones is becoming an indispensable feature of numerous devices. This in turn permits developers to create various tactile icons, or tactons to communicate information through the non-visual and non-auditory modality of touch. Tactons are messages conveyed through various patterns of vibrations. In this paper, we present our preliminary work on the use of tactons in order to discreetly convey information regarding the mood and urgency of text messages received on mobile phones. Such mechanism replaces the simple buzzing effect currently associated with text message notifications. Our preliminary evaluation shows encouraging results in terms of the ability of users to distinguish and recall various tactons produced by a mobile phone.