tactoRing: A Skin-Drag Discrete Display

Smart rings are an emerging wearable technology designed to deliver discreet notifications using haptic cues. Traditional tactile actuators stimulate limited skin receptors on the finger, restricting the expressiveness of conveyed information.

tactoRing introduces a novel tactile display that drags a small tactor around the finger to stimulate multiple skin areas, improving cue recognition accuracy. The paper presents the hardware design and a perception study demonstrating users’ ability to recognize eight distinct spatial points around the finger. Additionally, two encoding techniques based on skin-dragging motions achieved up to 94% recognition accuracy. Finally, the system showcases applications that combine sequences of tactile stimuli to provide richer expressiveness than previous wearable haptic methods.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3025453.3025703,
author = {Je, Seungwoo and Rooney, Brendan and Chan, Liwei and Bianchi, Andrea},
title = {tactoRing: A Skin-Drag Discrete Display},
year = {2017},
isbn = {9781450346559},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025703},
doi = {10.1145/3025453.3025703},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {3106–3114},
numpages = {9},
keywords = {eyes-free, haptics, ring, skin-drag, wearable},
location = {Denver, Colorado, USA},
series = {CHI '17}
}

Additional Publication

Pin-Cheng Lin, HyunJoo Oh, Mark D. Gross, Michael Eisenberg, Sherry His, Becca Rose Glowacki, Mark Wonnacott, Amy Rose, Emma Powell, Liv Bargman, Seungwoo Je, Brendan Rooney, Liwei Chan, and Andrea Bianchi. 2018. Demo Hour. Interactions 25, 2 (February 2018), 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3183514