Investigation of thermal feedback for in-car applications

Di Campli San Vito, Patrizia (2021) Investigation of thermal feedback for in-car applications. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Driving is a highly demanding task and modern cars employ a multitude of sensors and features to aid the driver. Safety can be increased by minimising visual distraction during driving and tactile feedback is often introduced as an alternative to, or an enhancement of, visual icons. Research on tactile in-car feedback is highly focused on vibrotactile feedback, restricting the design space by ignoring other tactile modalities with the potential to increase driving safety. Thermal feedback has been tested for mobile environments and shown high recognition accuracy, with the added advantage of causing potentially strong emotional associations with concepts, such as danger or urgency and familiarity. This thesis, therefore, explores the effectiveness of thermal feedback for in-car applications. The novelty of the feedback within this environment dictates the need to not only investigate the perceptability of this modality as a secondary task during driving, but also the impact of thermal feedback on driving behaviour and workload in a safe environment. Seven driving simulator studies tested different applications and aspects of thermal cues, such as directional cues, binary and in combination with spatial information, and different types of notifications. Results show the challenges and advantages of thermal cue design for presentation during driving and the effectiveness of the modality for navigation. Binary directional cues have high recognition rates, but face the challenge of the return to a neutral base temperature being misinterpreted as new cues. The number of these false positives was especially high for long thermal cues, which had the highest recognition rates. Design choices will have to be made in consideration of this fact. Spatial directional cues were effective, but the simultaneous presentation of cues with opposing direction of temperature change on each hand confused rather than aided the driver. In addition, the perceived urgency of thermal cues was compared to vibration and the two modalities were investigated together for informational notifications. Thermal cues were consistently rated as less urgent than both bimodal and vibrotactile cues. The addition of thermal feedback to urgent vibration cues led to longer reaction times, which renders bimodal tactile stimuli unsuited for urgent warnings. However, they could very accurately convey information to classify messages. Both thermal only and bimodal tactile stimuli had high recognition rates. While thermal feedback could not replace visual information during the transfer of control in a semi-autonomous car, the addition of bimodal tactile feedback led to an improvement of driving behaviour and was preferred by participants. These findings show the potential for thermal feedback within the driving environment.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: haptic, thermal, in-car, human computer interaction, user studies.
• Subjects: T Technology > T Technology (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Supervisor's Name: Brewster, Prof. Stephen
• Date of Award: 2021
• Depositing User: Ms Patrizia Di Campli San Vito
• Unique ID: glathesis:2021-82021
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 19 Feb 2021 09:44
• Last Modified: 10 Mar 2025 12:11
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.82021
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/82021

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