Exploration of cuing methods for localization of spatial cues using thermal haptic feedback on the forehead

摘要

Haptic feedback systems for spatial awareness are widely used in navigational and obstacle detection tasks and mostly used in combination with vibrotactile modules. As such, this work explores using thermal haptic feedback on the forehead for spatial awareness. As an initial step in this direction, our goal is to investigate the performance of different cueing methods for a minimal number of thermal elements. As such, the system uses three equally distributed peltier modules on the forehead to provide the thermal feedback. We investigated three different cuing methods with 3, 15 and 45 effective haptic feedback ranges. The results indicate that the 3 method to be the most precise (lowest error) while the 45 method to be the fastest for detecting the target.