Effect of temporality, physical activity and cognitive load on spatiotemporal vibrotactile pattern recognition

Previous research demonstrated the ability for users to accurately recognize Spatiotemporal Vibrotactile Patterns (SVP): sequences of vibrations on different motors occurring either sequentially or simultaneously. However, the experiments were only run in a lab setting and the ability for users to recognize SVP in a real-world environment remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate how several factors may affect recognition: (1) physical activity (running), (2) cognitive task (i.e. primary task, typing), (3) distribution of the vibration motors across body parts and (4) temporality of the patterns. Our results suggest that physical activity has very little impact, specifically compared to cognitive task, location of the vibrations or temporality. We discuss these results and propose a set of guidelines for the design of SVPs.