Texas team incorporates haptics into wearable tech

Engineers at Rice University, Texas, have developed a wearable, textile-based device that compensates for deficiencies in visual and auditory cues with haptic input.

Marcia O'Malley (from left), Barclay Jumet and Daniel Preston developed a wearable textile device that can deliver complex haptic cues in real time to users on the go - (Photo by Brandon Martin/Rice University

According to Barclay Jumet, a mechanical engineering PhD student who is the lead author on a study published in Device, technology has been slow to co-opt haptics or communication based on the sense of touch.

“Of the technologies that have incorporated haptics, wearable devices often still require bulky external hardware to provide complex cues, limiting their use in day-to-day activities,” Jumet said in a statement.

The system of haptic accessories built by the Rice labs of Daniel Preston and Marcia O’Malley is said to reduce the need for hardware by programming haptic cues into the textile structure of the wearables using fluidic control.

“With a traditional control system using voltage and current, you’d typically need many electronic inputs to achieve complex haptic cues,” said Preston, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. “In this device, we’ve offloaded a lot of that complexity to the fluidic controller and require only a very limited number of electronic inputs to provide sophisticated haptic stimulation.”

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