BuzzWear: alert perception in wearable tactile displays on the wrist

  • Authors:
  • Seungyon "Claire" Lee;Thad Starner

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present two experiments to evaluate wrist-worn wearable tactile displays (WTDs) that provide easy to perceive alerts for on-the-go users. The first experiment (2304 trials, 12 participants) focuses on the perception sensitivity of tactile patterns and reveals that people discriminate our 24 tactile patterns with up to 99% accuracy after 40 minutes of training. Among the four parameters (intensity, starting point, temporal pattern, and direction) that vary in the 24 patterns, intensity is the most difficult parameter to distinguish and temporal pattern is the easiest. The second experiment (9900 trials, 15 participants) focuses on dual task performance, exploring users' abilities to perceive three incoming alerts from two mobile devices (WTD and mobile phone) with and without visual distraction. The second experiment reveals that, when visually distracted, users' reactions to incoming alerts become slower for the mobile phone but not for the WTD.