Background perception and comprehension of symbols conveyed through vibrotactile wearable displays

Previous research has demonstrated the feasibility of conveying vibrotactile encoded information efficiently using wearable devices. Users can understand vibrotactile encoded symbols and complex messages combining such symbols. Such wearable devices can find applicability in many multitasking use cases. Nevertheless, for multitasking, it would be necessary for the perception and comprehension of vibrotactile information to be less attention demanding and not interfere with other parallel tasks. We present a user study which investigates whether high speed vibrotactile encoded messages can be perceived in the background while performing other concurrent attention-demanding primary tasks. The vibrotactile messages used in the study were limited to symbols representing letters of English Alphabet. We observed that users could very accurately comprehend vibrotactile such encoded messages in the background and other parallel tasks did not affect users performance. Additionally, the comprehension of such messages did also not affect the performance of the concurrent primary task as well. Our results promote the use of vibrotactile information transmission to facilitate multitasking.