Haptic Phone Interface for Ride-Hailing; with Gitter, Zhu, and Mountford, BayCHI Program
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2023-10-24

September 12, 2023
https://baychi.org/calendar/20230912/
It is routine for travelers to use a ride-hail company to transport themselves to and from airports, for a ride after a night out. Identifying the ride can create anxiety, as many cars look the same, arrive in a crowded location, and must be identified by their license plate. Eight percent of the US population are visually impaired, and 65% of people over 50 years old have visual impairment problems. We all appreciate how small notifications and vibrations on our personal devices help us navigate and remind us of everyday activities. These are ever more important for the visually impaired.

Our speakers will describe an iterative study conducted with the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Palo Alto and Ford Research Center. It developed audio and haptic (vibrating) phone features to locate a ride hail car, and the actual car door entry-point. The technology used was ultra wide-band sensing, available on iPhones. The tuning of specific audio levels and vibration effects to meet different use case needs continues to be challenging. Using inputs of visually challenged colleagues yielded an enriching case study to create a much more effective interface device for all.