Speaker: Alison Gibson, MVL Graduate Student
“An Investigation of Foot Vibrotactile Perception for Use in Multi-modal Information Presentation”
Abstract: The future of human space exploration will involve extra-vehicular activities (EVA) on foreign planetary surfaces (i.e. Mars), an activity that will have significantly different characteristics than the common exploration scenarios on Earth. The required use of a bulky, pressurized EVA suit perceptually disconnects human explorers from the hostile foreign environment, increasing the navigation workload and risk of collision associated with traversing through unfamiliar, rocky terrain. To assist the explorer in such tasks, multi-modal information presentation devices are being designed and evaluated. One application is to assist astronauts in ground obstacle avoidance via tactile channels of the feet. Before utilizing these signals as a form of information presentation, it is necessary to first characterize the tactile perception capabilities of the feet, in particular during distracted attention states. To better understand this, 10 participants completed a vibration detection study, with independent variables of attention state, vibration location, and vibration signal type. Accuracy of response was measured across conditions and results provide implications for the design of vibrotactile interfaces.