The experiments conducted in this project yielded a number of
conclusions. First and foremost, results suggest that haptic
feedback could play a valuable role in driver notification and
alerting in sensory overloaded conditions. This is supported by
the consistent reduction in response times in both experiments 1
and 2 when a haptic stimulus was present.
The next major conclusion of this work is that 3 levels of haptic
stimuli do in fact provide valuable feedback to improve
identification of a problem. This conclusion is supported by the
consistent reduction in response times for the haptic cases in
experiment 2 over those in experiment 1. This of course assumes
that the user is familiar with the form of the haptic message (in
our case frequency levels) and has experience interpreting these
messages.
As illustrated by Tables 1 and 2, the haptic stimuli significantly
reduced the number of missed responses. This conclusion is
useful because it implies that a haptic stimulus can draw attention
to a problem that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Of course,
in our simulated environment the maximum time allowed to
notice a response was 15 seconds, which could be too short or too
long in an actual environment. Also, one can imagine situations
when salient haptic stimuli could actually divert attention from
where it is most required; this proposition requires further testing
in a more sophisticated environment.
The time of response for the non-haptic errors was greater for
experiment 2 than experiment 1. We conjecture that this is caused
because of a higher reliance on the haptic stimuli when more
information is provided to the subject.
There were, however, a few problems with the experimental
procedure that could be worked out in future studies. The most
obvious of these is that the primary driving task was not
completely typical of a driving environment. Although we feel
that our distractor test was adequate for what we intended to test,
perhaps more realistic results would be possible if a different
distractor task such as a driving simulator is used.