HapBack - Providing Spatial Awareness at a Distance Using Haptic Stimulation

This paper presents a study done to gain knowledge on the communication of an object’s relative 3-dimensional position in relation to individuals who are visually impaired and blind. The HapBack, a continuation of the HaptWrap V1.0 (Duarte et al., 2018), focused on the perception of objects and their distances in 3-dimensional space using haptic communication. The HapBack is a device that consists of two elastic bands wrapped horizontally secured around the user’s torso and two backpack straps secured along the user’s back. The backpack straps are embedded with 10 vibrotactile motors evenly positioned along the spine. This device is designed to provide a wearable interface for blind and visually impaired individuals in order to understand how the position of objects in 3-dimensional space are perceived through haptic communication. We were able to analyze the accuracy of the HapBack device through three vectors (1) Two different modes of vibration – absolute and relative (2) the location of the vibrotactile motors when in absolute mode (3) and the location of the vibrotactile motors when in relative mode. The results provided support that the HapBack provided vibrotactile patterns that were intuitively mapped to distances represented in the study. We were able to gain a better understanding on how distance can be perceived through haptic communication in individuals who are blind through analyzing the intuitiveness of the vibro-tactile patterns and the accuracy of the user’s responses.