Design and Evaluation of Encoded Haptic Pulses for Smartwatches

Abstract

As smartwatches gain popularity in the marketplace, various smartwatch context studies have been conducted. The use of smartwatches can be divided into situations with and without constraint both physically and psychologically. Notably, in constrained situations, if the user wants to check the information received in the smartwatch visually, a high cognitive load is involved. To solve this problem, we propose a method to encode and transmit information from the smartwatch with haptic pulses. First, we determine the informational category of the smartwatch and generate various haptic pulses. Next, we propose and verify a haptic pulse set that can represent the informational category of the smartwatch. Using the proposed haptic pulse set, users can receive smartwatch information in constraint situations. The use of encoded haptic pulses needs to be considered to provide information effectively from the smartwatch to the wearer.