A Vibrotactile Alarm System for Pleasant Awakening

Georgios Korres, Camilla Birgitte Falk Jensen, Wanjoo Park, Carsten Bartsch, Mohamad Eid

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Abstract

There has been a vast development of personal informatics devices combining sleep monitoring with alarm systems, in order to find an optimal time to awaken a sleeping person in a pleasant way. Most of these systems implement auditory feedback, which is not always pleasant and may disturb other sleepers. We present an adaptive alarm system that detects sleeping cycles and triggers alarm signal during shallow sleep, to minimize sleep inertia. Since tactile sensation is associated with positive valence, vibrotactile stimulation is investigated as a silent alarm to enhance pleasant awakening. Three modulation techniques to render the tactile stimuli for pleasant awakening are considered, namely simultaneous, continuous, and successive stimulation. Two experimental studied are conducted. Experiment 1 studied exogenous attention towards tactile stimulation in a multimodal scenario (involving visual and haptic interactions) with fully awake individuals. Results from the attention task and the subjective valence rating suggest that the vibrotactile stimulation should be based on the continuous modulation, since this not only is very perceivable but also associated with positive attention. Experiment 2 evaluated the user experience with tactile stimulation patterns during sleep. Results confirmed the findings of experiment 1. Continuous modulation was rated highest for pleasant yet arousing sleep-awake transition.
Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Haptics
Volume11
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)357 - 366
ISSN1939-1412
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Vibrotactile Stimulation
  • Affective Haptics
  • Evaluation/Methodology
  • Haptic I/O
  • Pervasive Computing
  • Health Care
  • Psychology
  • User-centered Design

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