Development and evaluation of multidimensional tactons for a wearable tactile display

We developed a novel wearable tactile display system as an alternative to the visual and audio displays routinely used by anesthesiologists to monitor patients in the operating room (OR). Visual displays and auditory alarms can be distracting or insufficient in their alarm transmission whereas a tactile display, which utilizes the sense of touch, can act as an effective conduit for alert delivery. A sophisticated alarm scheme is essential to convey the complex array of physiological information available in current monitoring systems; therefore, to report all relevant alerts to the attending anesthesiologist, it is essential that an augmenting or replacement display system be at least as effective and efficacious as conventional systems. Using multidimensional Tactons, we designed a tactile alert scheme consisting of 36 unique stimuli and evaluated the accuracy arid response time in stimuli recognition using a tactile prototype worn as a belt. We observed an overall accuracy of 81% and a response time of 4.8 seconds. 4.18 bits (18.07 tokens) of messages were successfully communicated without loss of information. These results demonstrate that the novel tactile display represents an effective and potentially work-load-reducing method to convey vital information non-visually arid non-aurally.