Utilty of a Tactile Display for Cueing Faults

Tactile displays have been proposed as a multisensory interface technology that can relieve the typically overburdened visual channel of operators. This study compared the ability of operators, while simultaneously completing a tracking task, to detect and identify system faults in a monitoring task with three types of alert cues: tactile, visual, and redundant tactile and visual. For the tactile display, the location and vibration pulse speed of two tactors were mapped to four system faults. Response time was significantly faster with the tactile cue. Also, the tactile cue resulted in less interference with the concurrent tracking task, while not degrading vigilance to an additional concurrent visual monitoring task. These results suggest that further tactile cue research is warranted to examine potential applications in complex systems, such as control stations for unmanned aerial vehicles.