Haptic Patterns and Older Adults: to Repeat or not to Repeat?

Farah Arab (1) , Sabrina Paneels (1) , Margarita Anastassova (1) , Stéphanie Coeugnet (2) , Fanny Le Morellec (1) , Aurélie Dommes (2) , Aline Chevalier (3)

1 LRI - Laboratoire de Robotique Interactive
2 IFSTTAR/COSYS/LEPSIS - Laboratoire Exploitation, Perception, Simulateurs et Simulations
3 CLLE-LTC - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

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.

Mots clés: PERSONNE AGEE; DEPLACEMENT; ITINERAIRE ROUTIER; GPS; MILIEU URBAIN; HAPTIQUE

Domaines: Psychologie et comportements

Farah Arab, Sabrina Paneels, Margarita Anastassova, Stéphanie Coeugnet, Fanny Le Morellec, et al.. Haptic Patterns and Older Adults: to Repeat or not to Repeat?. 2015 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC), Jun 2015, Evanston, United States. pp.248-253, ⟨10.1109/WHC.2015.7177721⟩. ⟨hal-01471576⟩