Haptic Speech Communication Using Stimuli Evocative of Phoneme Production

Abstract

The tactile sense can be used as a channel for general communication, especially in contexts where the visual and auditory modalities are occupied with other tasks or compromised. We propose a new method for communicating generic words through the sense of touch that relies on delivering vibration patterns, representing the phonemes composing the words, to the user’s skin through two vibrotactile transducers worn on the forearm. The novelty of this technique is that vibration patterns are created from the audio of the corresponding English phoneme, resulting in vibration patterns that resemble physical characteristics when uttering the phoneme during normal speech. After 100 minutes of training, participants were able to recognize 50 words rendered haptically with an average accuracy of 94.4%. Results support the possibility of using the proposed apparatus in real-world applications.