Using tactile rhythm to convey interpersonal distances to individuals who are blind

This paper presents a scheme for using tactile rhythms to convey interpersonal distance to individuals who are blind or visually impaired, with the goal of providing access to non-verbal cues during social interactions. A preliminary experiment revealed that subjects could identify the proposed tactile rhythms and found them intuitive for the given application. Future work aims to improve recognition results and increase the number of interpersonal distances conveyed by incorporating temporal change information into the proposed methodology.