Design of a wearable vibrotactile display waist belt

In this paper, the design of a wearable vibrotactile display waist belt that can impart situation awareness information on the user's waist were presented. The hardware of the vibrotactile display consists of 12 tactors attached to an elastic belt and the associated control and drive circuit. A technical overview and experiments of the system is presented as well as preliminary results on tactile perception to evaluate its performance on information transmission. These experiments show that the vibrotactile code scheme for direction is effective in increasing the users' situation awareness.