TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Tactile GPS Tells Your Hands When to Turn the Wheel

Rebecca Kutzer-Rice | Date: 10-08-10 | Comments

A new steering wheel device navigates drivers by tugging the skin on their hands. Researchers hope the tool will help prevent accidents by directing people with hearing impairments and those distracted by noisy environments.

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Tactile GPS Tells Your Hands When to Turn the Wheel
For hearing-impaired drivers and people listening to music, spoken directions�whether from a GPS system or a passenger�often go unheard. Missing a turn can lead to lost drivers, dangerous swerving and wasted gasoline. A new system being developed by researchers at the University of Utah could prevent these problems. The device, mounted onto the steering wheel, gives drivers tactile directions by tugging on the skin of their left or right index fingers.

The steering wheel sensor helps direct drivers through their sense of touch (source: William Provancher, University of Utah).

Instead of encouraging distracted driving with cell phones, the researchers hope to promote safer driving, especially for people with hearing impairments.

"It has the potential of being a safer way of doing what's already being done�delivering information that people are already getting with in-car GPS navigation systems," says William Provancher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah.

"We are not saying people should drive and talk on a cell phone, and that tactile navigation cues will keep you out of trouble," University of Utah psychology Ph.D. student Nate Medeiros-Ward relates.

In the study, drivers used steering wheels equipped with red TrackPoint caps from IBM ThinkPad computers�those eraserlike modules on some laptops. Participants rested their index fingers on the TrackPoints, which gently tugged the skin to the left or the right, depending on how the drivers were supposed to turn.

The device could be used in commercial automobiles in as little as three years (source: Nate Medeiros-Ward, University of Utah).

In the trials, the test drivers talked on their cell phones while either receiving audio cues from a GPS system or tactile cues from the TrackPoint sensors. With audio cues, the drivers only had a 74 percent accurate turn rate, but with fingertip navigation directions, their accuracy was 98 percent.

Next: Communicating via Sense of Touch >>