Patent ID: 8406961

Claim:
A reconfigurable vehicle user interface system comprising: a steering wheel; a touch screen disposed along an outer surface of the steering wheel that generates a signal upon sensing user contact with a touch-sensitive surface of the touch screen, wherein the signal is dependent on location of the user contact; a controller that receives the signal generated by the touch screen and determines a function command from the signal based on the location of the user contact; a plurality of input shortcuts displayed on the touch screen, each user input shortcut has a mapping to a specific function command, wherein each user input shortcut displayed on the touch screen indicates to the user the specific function command that is mapped to the user input shortcut; and a touch screen reconfiguration module that receives a user configuration specified by the user indicating a configuration of the plurality of user input shortcuts and displays the plurality of user input shortcuts according to the user configuration, wherein the user configuration includes an amount of user input shortcuts to be displayed, locations of each of the user input shortcuts, sizes of each of the user input shortcuts, and the mapping of the location to function command of each of the user input shortcuts, the touch screen reconfiguration module and the touch screen defining a plurality of different user selectable screen layouts for configuring the wheel-mounted touch screen, each layout characterized by a predefined number of discrete areas each adapted to accommodate one shortcut, the touch screen reconfiguration module being further adapted to allow the user to select among the plurality of different screen layouts by specifying the number of shortcuts desired to be displayed and by further selecting which of the discrete areas of a selected layout shall contain a shortcut.