Design of a bilateral vibrotactile feedback system for lateralization

We present a bilateral vibrotactile feedback system for accurate lateralization of target angles in the complete 360 degree-range. We envision integrating this system into context-aware hearing instruments (HIs) or cochlear implants (CIs) to support users that experience lateralization difficulties. As a foundation for this it is vital to investigate which kind of feedback and vibration patterns are optimal to provide support for lateralization. Our system enables to evaluate and compare different encoding schemes with respect to resolution, reaction time, intuitiveness and user dependency. The system supports bilateral vibrotactile feedback to reflect integration into HIs or CIs worn at both ears and implemented two approaches: Quantized Absolute Heading (QAH) and Continuous Guidance Feedback (CGF). We provide a detailed description of our hardware that was designed to be also applicable for generic vibrotactile feedback applications.