LATEST IEEE PROJECT ABSTRACT FOR ECE-Navigation by the soles of your feet

Navigation by the Soles of Your Feet
Vibrating driver's seats and shoe inserts are proving
that humans can gather information using unusual
parts of the body

Photo: MCS Lab/Panamericana University
Good Vibrations: Actuator-embedded insoles gave wearers directions
BY Anne-Marie Corley // October 2009
30 October 2009—The human gateway to the electronic world is mostly through our eyes
and ears. But devices that connect through our sense of touch have been developed for
the fingertips, the chest, the back, and even the tongue. Now researchers in Mexico have
come up with a device to communicate via your feet, and a collaboration between a
Dutch organization and General Motors has tested a way to communicate potentially vital
driving information through none other than your rear end.
The point of these new tactile devices is to develop touch-sensitive applications for
virtual reality, gaming, robotics, rehabilitation, navigation, and assistance for the blind or
visually impaired, among others things.
The shoe dropped at the recent IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots
and Systems. Ramiro Velazquez, an assistant professor in the Mechatronics and Control
Systems Lab at Mexico's Panamerican University, presented his computer-sole interface,
89. Rangarajapuram main road,(Near SBI Bank), Kodambakkam
Chennai-600024,
http://www.maastechindia.com

which will be worn inside a shoe in its final version. It's the first device to stimulate the
bottom of the feet to convey information, rather than to enhance sensation. The goal of
his study, Velazquez says, was to answer the question, "Are we capable of understanding
information through our feet?"
The answer, it turns out, is yes.
His group chose to stimulate an area of the foot that has a high concentration of receptors
for texture and vibration sensing—around where the arch and the ball of the foot meet,
along the outer edge of the sole. The researchers arrayed four rows of four miniature
vibrating motors of the type used in cellphones, available commercially for US $10, in
Chennai-600024,

the shoe insert. Each of these 16 actuators could be activated independently and at
different vibrating frequencies to transmit signals, meant to communicate directions and
patterns, to 20 research subjects in their study.
First, the researchers tested whether people could understand "dynamic directions," or
signals moving in certain directions on the bottom of the feet, while the subjects simply
sat still. The researchers matched cardinal directions to patterns on the shoe insert by
vibrating rows and columns of the actuators one after another. They vibrated heel row to
toe row, for example, to indicate north, or forward, and reversed the direction from toe
row to heel row to indicate south, or backward.
The researchers also tested the subjects' ability to perceive geometric shapes made by the
vibrating actuators; patterns of vibration, like the alerts for calls or text messages on
cellphones; and navigation cues using the dynamic directions as before but this time
while the subjects were walking blindfolded around obstacles in a room. They found that
people were best at sensing directions and recognizing patterns. In the navigation test,
completed by five of the original 20 subjects, four tested well. One got pretty turned
around, though even he eventually made it through the obstacle course.
Certain information is just not easily discernible when transmitted via foot
communication, Velazquez found. The test subjects had difficulty determining geometric
shapes, such as a line, a circle, or a square. Velazquez explains that because vibrations
expand throughout the skin, very specific geometric information—such as a diagonal line
—is difficult to distinguish.
Still, humans can glean a lot from the soles of their feet. Now that his group has seen
what's possible, Velazquez hopes they can create "a new tactile language for the feet" that
you'd learn just like any other language.
Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute professor Mel Siegel says that although the device is
"clearly an early prototype," it shows the promise of "really doing something useful," like
aiding the visually impaired. It also comes at a time when our primary senses for
navigation and mapping the world around us—our eyes and ears—are overloaded, Siegel
points out. "Everyone talks about sensory overload," he says. But if you could use this
"other modality"—touch—you might be able to take in important information without
competition in the same arena from other visual or audio signals, Siegel says, although
experiments would need to prove that hypothesis.

Chennai-600024,

Photo: MCS Lab/Panamericana University
Feel the Noise: Blindfolded subjects were steered around a room using vibrational cues
on their feet
The car is a good example of a potentially overloaded sensory environment. Driverassistance, crash-avoidance, communication, and entertainment systems all contribute to
a crowd of audio and visual information knocking about in the vehicle. But what if we
could take advantage of the underworked tactile sense?
That's a theory that researchers at General Motors and the Dutch research organization
TNO took for a test-drive last year. Using a cushion that gives you directions straight
Chennai-600024,

through the seat of your pants, the researchers set out to discover if drivers could actually
feel direction signals—not just in the lab but also in the harsh reality of driving on real
roads, according to TNO researcher Jeroen Hogema. Would vibration signals be masked
by rough roads? Would drivers fail to notice the signals if they were concentrating on the
actual task of driving?
The researchers tested eight subjects on the device, which was "neatly designed into the
upholstery," Hogema says, so it looked "like a normal seat of a car." The seat-cushion
device had 64 motors, also of the "silent alarm" cellphone variety, and any of them could
be actuated separately, although the researchers clustered groups of actuators to code for
eight different directions: front, front left, front right, right, left, back, back left, and back
right. They used a single type of test signal: three short, vibrating bursts. Subjects
reported the signal as soon as they felt it and the direction as soon as they sensed it.
Like the sole-stimulating shoe, the vibrating seat cushion did its job. Researchers found
that 93.3 percent of the responses were correct, while 6.4 percent were off by one
direction segment and just 0.3 percent were off by two segments. In other words,
Hogema explains, no one confused left with right or back with front. Rather, the mistakes
were more subtle. There were "no situations where the chair gave a direction and the
person didn't get the message at all," he says.
In addition to providing direction or navigation information, a rear-end-stimulating seat
cushion could be used to avoid getting rear-ended. Seat-cushion direction cues might be
an ideal output system for collision-avoidance radar. Although the researchers didn't test
the car seat with that possibility in mind, they did show its potential by surprising their
subjects with yet another message from the chair after the drivers thought the test was
over. Every subject felt the unexpected signal quickly, and almost all of them picked the
correct direction.
"It's encouraging that people can get the message" from such an unusual spot, Hogema
says, and that they can "do so rapidly and with very few errors."
The next stage of this project would be to link the direction signals to a certain
application, says Hogema. While his group at TNO is no longer involved, GM is still
working on the project but is keeping mum on the details. TNO and GM are reporting
their initial results in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
Success with both prototypes—the shoe and the seat cushion—indicates that people can
indeed use tactile cues to pick up directional information, although we're still a long way
from navigating to the grocery store using the electronics on our feet or the cushion under
our seat.
Still, even if these vibrators don't yield the right information, Velazquez jokes, they could
provide excellent massages.
Block Diagram
Chennai-600024,

Power Supply
Obstacle
Sensor
Pic
Microcontroller
PIC 16F877

Speaker
Voice
Output

Direction Sensor
(N E W S)

APR 9600
Voice
Recording and
Playback

Relay Driver Unit

Relay

Relay

Relay

Relay

DC
Motor 1
(forward)

DC
Motor 2
(reverse)

DC
Motor 3
(left)

DC
Motor 4
(right)

Small DC Motor Fixed to the shoes

Chennai-600024,

LATEST IEEE PROJECT ABSTRACT FOR ECE-Navigation by the soles of your feet

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LATEST IEEE PROJECT ABSTRACT FOR ECE-Navigation by the soles of your feet