A belt and textile sleeves, developed by Rice University engineers, rely on fluidic signals to help declutter, enhance—and, in the case of impairments—compensate for deficiencies in visual and auditory inputs by tapping an underused sensory resource — the sense of touch.
HAPTIC ACCESSORIES & DEVELOPERS: The system of haptic accessories or communication based on the sense of touch, built by the Rice labs of Daniel Preston and Marcia O’Malley, reduces the need for hardware by programming haptic cues into the textile structure of the wearables using fluidic control.
- The study—'Fluidically programmed wearable haptic textiles'—published in Device, has Barclay Jumet, a mechanical engineering PhD student, as the lead author.
- The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Rice University Academy of Fellows and the Gates Millennium Scholars Program.
THE WEARABLES: The belt incorporates a slimmed-down version of the electronic control system that might otherwise be required.
- Twelve pouches across two sleeves progressively inflate to indicate one of four directions: forward, backward, left or right.
- The wearables rely on fluidic signals — such as pressures and flow rates — to control the delivery of complex haptic cues, including sensations like vibration, tapping and squeezing.
- A small, lightweight carbon dioxide tank affixed to the belt feeds airtight circuits incorporated in the heat-sealable textiles, causing quarter-sized pouches — up to six on each sleeve — to inflate with varying force and frequency.
- The wearable textile device could incorporate other sensing and control mechanisms to allow users with limited vision or hearing to detect obstacles and navigate dynamic environments in real time.
- Devices like this could, for instance, also be helpful for people suffering from hearing loss.
- Another application example is restoring the sense of touch for an amputee by embedding sensors on a prosthesis to gather data that the wearables could relay as haptic feedback elsewhere on the body.
- The heat-sealable textiles are resilient to wear and tear, making the device suitable for intensive daily use.
- The durability of the haptic textiles was tested by washing a device 25 times then cutting it open with a knife and ironing a textile patch over the cut. It continued to work as intended after repeated washing, cutting and repairing.
THE EXPERIMENTS: In an experiment demonstrating the device’s utility for real-world navigation, the cues served as directions guiding a user on a mile-long route through the streets of Houston.
- In another experiment, a user outlined invisible Tetris pieces in a field by following the directions conveyed to them through the haptic textiles.
WHAT THEY SAID:
One of the big advantages with using these smart textiles for haptic devices is that they bring a lot more freedom and flexibility to the design space. We’re no longer constrained by the size or geometry of components that need to be incorporated into a design.
— Marcia O’Malley
Chair / Family Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering / Thomas Michael Panos in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering and Computer Science
Rice University
Technology has been slow to co-opt haptics or communication based on the sense of touch. Of the technologies that have incorporated haptics, wearable devices often still require bulky external hardware to provide complex cues, limiting their use in day-to-day activities… In the future, this technology could be directly integrated with navigational systems, so that the very textiles making up one’s clothing can tell users which way to go without taxing their already overloaded visual and auditory senses — for instance by needing to consult a map or listen to a virtual assistant.
— Barclay Jumet
Lead Author / Mechanical Engineering PhD student
Rice University
