Steering wheel sensor as a push-to-talk solution

In today´s vehicles, there are a number of electronic devices that are manually operated while driving. Speech interaction systems are employed to relieve distraction caused by the operation of these devices. Push-to-talk buttons are used to trigger speech recognizers. In this paper we present a new push-to-talk solution that is activated by tapping a finger on the perimeter of the steering wheel, where force sensor strips are located. At the same time these sensors can be used to measure gripping force while driving. The paper describes the design of the sensor system as well as a demonstration setup. A short pilot study was run as a proof of concept, which indicates that the new system does not perform worse than the existing, fixed position PTT solution.