Vibrotactile Display for Driving Safety Information

Vehicle driving support systems such as navigation systems and dead-angle warning systems make us safer and more comfortable. These kinds of systems provide only visual and auditory information. However, visual driving support systems are restricted in driver´s field-of-view and auditory warning signals can lose in radio music, engine noise, or conversation noise. Tactile displays using vibration motors can provide useful information in spite of restricted field-of-view and noisy environment. It may quickly draw the attention of the driver when important events occur: for instance, collision warning and directional cues. These intuitive and quick cues may be combined together with the visual and auditory display to give multimodal feedback to the driver. In this paper, we present a vibrotactile display device for providing safety information to drivers. User studies with the vibrotactile device on the top of the foot show 86.7% recognition rate for alphabet characters after some training and 83.9% for providing driving safety information