Development and evaluation of an in-vehicle haptic navigation system

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed an in-vehicle haptic navigation system to overcome some limitations of current in-vehicle navigation aid systems. The haptic interface using vibrotactile signals with a 5-by-5 tactor array was installed on the back of the chair. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system in various cognitive load conditions, we implemented a visual search experiment using a flicker paradigm. Sixteen participants were recruited to evaluate the proposed haptic navigation system. The two independent variables were validity (valid cue, invalid cue, and no cueing) and cognitive load levels (high and low) of search tasks. Despite of the cognitive load levels, the valid cue conditions elicited shorter response times than invalid cue and no cueing conditions. The result strongly supports the effectiveness of the proposed in-vehicle navigation systems. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media.