6 TACTILE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

The sense of touch is a very natural candidate for helping those whose daily lives are limited by impairments involving other sensory modalities. This chapter considers how the sense of touch has been used to compensate for deficiencies in the visual, auditory, and vestibular systems. For the visually impaired, tactile displays have been developed to assist in "reading" text, such as braille, and to aid mobility by providing cues regarding obstacles in the immediate environment. Tactile displays that compensate for impaired hearing range from systems that translate environmental sounds into patterns of vibration on the skin, to devices that assist with learning speech reading. For all these applications, there is interest in developing tactile vocabularies to enhance the capacity for communication. The chapter will conclude with an overview of this work and the challenges associated with creating tactile words, known as tactons.