Defining a Model for Development of Tactile Interfaces on Smartphones

Tactile interaction on smartphones is becoming increasingly important in assistive technologies and special purpose applications. Although various tactile techniques exist, the development of effective and user-friendly tactile applications lacks design guidance. This work describes a distinct model that guides designers and developers in developing tactile interfaces on smartphones. The model has three distinct parts, namely, quantifying tactile stimuli, clustering, and tactile application experiment. We review existing techniques for processing each part and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. And we implement a tactile application on a TPad (Tactile Pattern display) phone on the basis of the design procedure of the model to demonstrate its usage. Results show that the workflow of the model can guide developers in implementing efficient tactile applications.