Haptic Hand Guidance

2015–2017 10

SonoCraftAR

2025–Present
RampNet

2025–Present
StreetReaderAI

2024–Present
GeoQA^3

2024–Present
Accessibility Scout

2024–Present

Project Description

Precisely guiding a blind person’s hand or finger(s) can be useful for a range of applications from tracing printed text to learning and understanding shapes and gestures. In this research project, we design, build, and study a range of novel haptic devices and actuation patterns to provide directional hand or finger guidance. We explore haptic-only solutions as well as hybrid audio+haptic approaches. We derive implications for the design of finger-worn and wrist-worn directional haptic feedback and describe open areas for future work.

Publications

Evaluating Wrist-Based Haptic Feedback for Non-Visual Target Finding and Path Tracing on a 2D Surface

Jonggi Hong, Alisha Pradhan, Jon E. Froehlich, Leah Findlater

Proceedings of ASSETS 2017 | Acceptance Rate: 26.2% (33 / 126)

keywords: wearables, haptics, accessibility, blind, blind users, haptic feedback, haptic wristband, directional guidance

PDF doi Cite Touchscreen Accessibility HandSight Haptic Hand Guidance

Evaluating Haptic and Auditory Directional Guidance to Assist Blind People in Reading Printed Text Using Finger-Mounted Cameras

Lee Stearns, Ruofei Du, Uran Oh, Catherine Jou, Leah Findlater, David Ross, Jon E. Froehlich

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) 2016

keywords: wearables, handsight, accessibility, visual impairments, real-time ocr, blind reading

PDF doi Cite HandSight Haptic Hand Guidance

Evaluating Angular Accuracy of Wrist-based Haptic Directional Guidance for Hand Movement

Jonggi Hong, Lee Stearns, Tony Cheng, Jon E. Froehlich, David Ross, Leah Findlater

Proceedings of GI 2016 | Acceptance Rate: 39.4% (13 / 33)

keywords: wearables, haptics, non-visual directional guidance, handsight

PDF doi Cite HandSight Haptic Hand Guidance

We design, build, and evaluate new interactive tools and techniques to address pressing societal challenges. Makeability refers both to how our technological innovations make new abilities possible for humans as well as our educational mission to help students gain new abilities as they learn and grow through research, invention, and human-centered design.