Haptic Feedback in Everyday Conversation Situations

Abstract

Everyday face-to-face communication situations use a variety of communication channels. In addition to the verbalized information, several non-verbal cues are communicated, which have to be interpreted by the communication partners. Blind and visually impaired people are limited in interpretation as they are not able to process the visual non-verbal information. The idea behind this work is to design a prototype for a Sensory Substitution Device that aims to support communication. The purpose of the prototype is to remap visual stimuli into tactile information, by utilizing the Facial Action Coding System. For this reason, this work investigates which tactile feedback is particularly suitable for supporting a conversation situation. The feedback types compared here are vibration feedback and temperature feedback such as heat and cold. For the comparison, a within-subject-design experiment was carried out, in which the speech act of a blind person was simulated.