Delivering Multi-Sensory and Multi-Scale Haptic Cues through Wearables

Vibrotactile haptic feedback is ubiquitous for notifications and alerts in portable devices such as phones, smart watches, and fitness trackers, but the set of possible notifications is limited by the nature of the eccentric motors so often used to deliver such cues. Wearable haptics refers to systems worn on the body or integrated into clothing that can provide haptic feedback to the wearer in a wide range of forms, such as vibrotactile, cutaneous, skin stretch, pressure, and kinesthetic feedback. The potential for wearable haptics is supported by technological advancements in sensing and actuation that allow for the design and deployment of flexible materials, fabrics, and small-footprint actuators that can augment and enhance human performance. While rigid and grounded haptic feedback devices have been explored as a means to train new motor skills, rehabilitate movement coordination after neurological injury, and even augment human force output capabilities in tasks such as lifting or running, the application space is limited due to the weight and scale of such devices. Wearable haptic devices seek to overcome the limitations of rigid and grounded haptic devices.<br/><br/>In recent years, my group has been designing novel wearable haptic systems that provide multiple haptic modalities of feedback to the user, including vibration, skin stretch, pressure, and kinesthetic feedback, all packaged in bands that can be worn on the arm. We are also exploring how to encode high-fidelity haptic cues that can be actively explored by the fingers within low-fidelity haptic cues that are displayed on the arm. We are particularly interested in applications where the provision of such feedback has a measurable impact on human performance. In this talk, I will present some of our wearable haptic systems, describe our target applications, and highlight the distinguishing features our hardware while identifying opportunities for improvement.