Providing navigation assistance through ForceHand: a wearable force-feedback glove

Conveying information through force-feedback has multiple advantages as compared to auditory or visual information transfer. Kinesthetic senses, in general, have shown enormous importance in human communication and to the very experience of being human. Kinesthetic learners tend to learn complex tasks through force-feedback and tactile sensations, in much lesser time as compared to auditory and visual learners. Navigation cues provided through force-feedback could eliminate the need for intensively engaging oneself to mobile devices. This type of feedback cue could also eliminate the need for auditory and visual engagement of the user, which can help sustained awareness of the proximity. This paper attempts the realization of a navigation assistant using a force-feedback glove enabled with low-pressure pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). This glove enables the user to receive navigation cues through force-feedback on the forearm. We used a gaming environment to evaluate the feasibility of using the glove as a navigation assistant. The gaming experiment also provided vast subjective feedback. 89.5% of the participants chose force-feedback as their most preferred type of cue. In addition, an experiment was carried out to identify the optimum resolution of input air pressure that could be successfully differentiated by the users. The average % accuracy in identifying the correct larger force from pairs of forces was found to be 97.6%, 89.2%, 80.8%, and 75.6%, respectively, for resolutions of 20, 15, 10, and 5kPa.