Haptic patterns and older adults: To repeat or not to repeat?

Haptic technologies can open up new avenues for assisting older people in their daily activities, in particular in navigation and orientation tasks. A number of haptic wearables have already proven their usefulness for younger individuals. However, older adults' specific needs for a haptic navigation aid have seldom been investigated. The same is valid for the design of haptic patterns that would be both acceptable and efficient for the elderly. This paper is a contribution in this direction. It is focused on the design of a set of haptic patterns for and by the elderly. It presents the user evaluation that was conducted to assess the recognition rate of these patterns during a navigation task in an urban environment. Fourteen elderly participants took part in the study. The results showed that repetitions of a sequence within a pattern were not crucial for their discrimination and recall. On the contrary, they can cause memorization difficulties and confusion. We discuss these results and propose a number of recommendations for the design of haptic patterns adapted to the older adults' needs.