The design and evaluation of a vibrotactile progress bar

We present an investigation into the use of Tactons to present progress information. Progress bars are common but must compete for screen space and visual attention with other visual tasks. We created a tactile progress indicator, encoding progress into a series of vibrotactile pulses. An experiment comparing the tactile progress indicator to a standard visual one showed a significant improvement in performance and an overall preference for the tactile display

An investigation into the use of tactons to present progress information

www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen Abstract. This paper presents an initial investigation into the use of Tactons, or tactile icons, to present progress information in desktop human-computer interfaces. Progress bars are very common in a wide range of interfaces but have problems. For example, they must compete for screen space and visual attention with other visual tasks such as document editing or web browsing. To address these problems we created a tactile progress indicator, encoding progress information into a series of vibrotactile cues. An experiment comparing the tactile progress indicator to a standard visual one showed a significant improvement in performance and an overall preference for the tactile display. These results suggest that a tactile display is a good way to present such information and this has many potential applications from computer desktops to mobile telephones.

Developing an interactive overview for non-visual exploration of tabular numerical information

This thesis investigates the problem of obtaining overview information from complex tabular numerical data sets non-visually. Blind and visually impaired people need to access and analyse numerical data, both in education and in professional occupations. Obtaining an overview is a necessary first step in data analysis, for which current non-visual data accessibility methods offer little support. This thesis describes a new interactive parametric sonification technique called High-Density Sonification (HDS), which facilitates the process of extracting overview information from the data easily and efficiently by rendering multiple data points as single auditory events. Beyond obtaining an overview of the data, experimental studies showed that the capabilities of human auditory perception and cognition to extract meaning from HDS representations could be used to reliably estimate relative arithmetic mean values within large tabular data sets. Following a user-centred design methodology, HDS was implemented as the primary form of overview information display in a multimodal interface called TableVis. This interface supports the active process of interactive data exploration non-visually, making use of proprioception to maintain contextual information during exploration (non-visual focus+context), vibrotactile data annotations (EMA-Tactons) that can be used as external memory aids to prevent high mental workload levels, and speech synthesis to access detailed information on demand. A series of empirical studies was conducted to quantify the performance attained in the exploration of tabular data sets for overview information using TableVis. This was done by comparing HDS with the main current non-visual accessibility technique (speech synthesis), and by quantifying the effect of different sizes of data sets on user performance, which showed that HDS resulted in better performance than speech, and that this performance was not heavily dependent on the size of the data set. In addition, levels of subjective workload during exploration tasks using TableVis were investigated, resulting in the proposal of EMA-Tactons, vibrotactile annotations that the user can add to the data in order to prevent working memory saturation in the most demanding data exploration scenarios. An experimental evaluation found that EMA-Tactons significantly reduced mental workload in data exploration tasks. Thus, the work described in this thesis provides a basis for the interactive non-visual exploration of a broad range of sizes of numerical data tables by offering techniques to extract overview information quickly, performing perceptual estimations of data descriptors (relative arithmetic mean) and managing demands on mental workload through vibrotactile data annotations, while seamlessly linking with explorations at different levels of detail and preserving spatial data representation metaphors to support collaboration with sighted users

Informative Vibrotactile Displays to Support Attention and Task Management in Anesthesiology.

The task set of an anesthesiologist, like that of operators in many complex, data-rich domains, requires effective management of attention, which must be divided among multiple tasks and task-relevant data sources. The inefficient allocation of attentional resources can lead to errors in monitoring a patient’s physiology, which constitute a significant portion of preventable medical errors. To better support attention management and multitasking performance without additionally loading the visual or auditory channels, this dissertation describes work to develop novel “continuously-informing” vibrotactile displays of physiological data. These displays use coded vibration patterns to communicate blood pressure and respiration data in real time. A theory-based approach was taken in the design of these displays to support the properties of “preattentive reference”: the signals can be processed in parallel without interfering with ongoing tasks, include partial information to support efficient task-switching, and can be processed in a mentally economical way. A series of research activities identified: 1) types of information that could best support anesthesiologists in task management decisions; 2) how to display this information via vibrotactile signals in ways that minimize perceptual interference from effects such as vibrotactile adaptation, masking, and tactile “change blindness”; 3) how to encode the information in vibrotactile patterns to minimize interference with concurrent tasks at cognitive processing stages; and 4) mappings between signal modulations and the represented data that best support economical processing. An evaluation study, set in a high-fidelity clinical simulation, showed substantial improvements in anesthesiologists’ multitasking performance, including faster detection and correction of serious health events, and fewer unnecessary interruptions of ongoing tasks with continuously-informing tactile displays, when compared to performance with traditional (visual/auditory) display configurations. This work contributes to theories and models of tactile and multimodal information processing, specifically concerning the performance effects of perceptual and cognitive interferences when information is processed via two or more sensory channels concurrently. It also demonstrates how a vibrotactile display designed to support properties of preattentive reference can improve attention management and multitask performance, thus showing promise for reducing the prevalence of monitoring errors and system awareness issues in anesthesiology and other complex, data rich domains.Ph.D.Industrial & Operations EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78911/1/ferrist_1.pd

The Design and Evaluation of a Vibrotactile Progress Bar

We present an investigation into the use of Tactons to present progress information. Progress bars are common but must compete for screen space and visual attention with other visual tasks. We created a tactile progress indicator, encoding progress into a series of vibrotactile pulses. An experiment comparing the tactile progress indicator to a standard visual one showed a significant improvement in performance and an overall preference for the tactile display. 1