Octopus Glove

A funded project by OCAD University. The Octopus Glove is a wearable designed for people with special needs. The target audience was people who are visually impaired. Through this project, the team built a language based on haptic to communicate day-to-day information to the user. Such as time and directions.

Technology Used: Arduino, vibration motors and Piezoelectric actuators

The Idea

Touch is an important and often underutilized sense in human-computer interaction. For those with hearing or seeing impairments, touch becomes even more important and may be the only suitable communication channel. Touch can also be used to convey information discreetly. Also, time plays a crucial role in our daily lives and therefore telling the time is very important. The two main subjects of this project are touch and time.

The team realised the importance of 'senses', which we as humans have not fully explored. Therefore, we started reaching and building a new tactile language through haptics that can be used for day-to-day activities for visually challenged people.

The Question:

Can we use actuators to communicate complex messages?

Parameters such as frequency, amplitude, rhythm, and duration can be used to translate complex messages.

Research 1

Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display

Example: Reading with Spatio-temporal messages.

Encoding alphabets and numbers in a grid
Using time and location to train users to recognize patterns

[3] Stephen Brewster and Lorna M. Brown. 2004. Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display. In Proceedings of the fifth conference on Australasian user interface - Volume 28 (AUIC '04). Australian Computer Society, Inc., AUS, 15–

Research 2

Skin Reading: Encoding Text in a 6-Channel Haptic Display

Choosing locations for tactile sensors
Encoding used 3-vibromotors at a time

Types of techniques:

Actuators
Air-pumped Soft Pneumatic actuators
Peizoelectric actuators

[2] Granit Luzhnica, Eduardo Veas, and Viktoria Pammer. 2016. Skin Reading: encoding text in a 6-channel haptic display. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC'16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 148–155. https://doi.org/10.1145/2971763.2971769