Driving Innovation

The incorporation of touchscreens into different types of consumer devices has significantly transformed the way we interact with technology, offering numerous benefits that enhance the user experience. From smartphones and tablets to home appliances and wearable devices, touchscreens have become a ubiquitous feature, providing intuitive and engaging interactions.

One of the key benefits of touchscreens is their ease of use. With a simple tap or swipe of a finger, users can navigate through menus, access applications, and control various functions. This simplicity makes touchscreens accessible to users of all ages and technical backgrounds, eliminating the need for complex buttons or controls.

Another advantage of touchscreens is their versatility. Unlike physical buttons or switches, touchscreens offer dynamic and context-aware interfaces. They can adapt and change based on the application or task at hand, allowing for a more personalized and immersive experience. This versatility enables devices to offer a wide range of functionalities without the need for additional physical components.

But while touchscreens offer a range of benefits, one important consideration is that they require our attention and focus to operate effectively. Interacting with touchscreens involves direct physical contact and visual engagement, demanding our active participation throughout the interaction. Under certain circumstances, this makes touchscreens a poor choice as an input device.

In particular, in-vehicle environments have increasingly incorporated touchscreens into their designs in recent years for infotainment systems, climate control, and other functions. However, research has shown that these types of interfaces can contribute to distracted driving and driver fatigue. For this reason, a team at Queen’s University in Ontario has developed a new type of in-vehicle interface known as FabriCar. As the name implies, FabriCar is a system of fabric-based sensors, and they are initially being targeted at non-driving applications, like media control.

The team’s goal was to seamlessly blend interactive elements into the interior of the car using e-textiles. These were manufactured via a five-step process. In the first step, solderable, conductive threads are stitched to a felt base. The threads are connected through 16-channel multiplexers to the analog input pins of an Arduino-compatible microcontroller development board. Next, piezo-resistive black fabric pieces are attached to the conductive threads to enable pressure sensing in a grid pattern. A polyester hexagonal black mesh fabric is then added to the stack to add a buffer between active layers and provide tactile feedback.

Conductive threads are stitched to the top of the mesh fabric, in a pattern appropriate for the application, and are wired to output digital pins of the microcontroller. For aesthetic purposes, a fifth layer is added to the top to provide visual hints about the types of gestures that the interface supports. The pressure sensing is activated when the conductive threads connected to the microcontroller’s input and output pins are pressed together.

The researchers incorporated their FabriCar sensors into three in-vehicle locations — a seatbelt cover, steering wheel, and headrest. The seatbelt pad can sense vertical bi-directional swiping gestures which the team utilized to turn audio volume up or down. The steering wheel, on the other hand, was assigned a double-tap gesture to avoid inadvertent triggering during normal steering. The double-tap would toggle media between playing and pausing. The headrest was configured as a single-tap tap sensor, again to play/pause media, but of course it would be trivial to assign this gesture to a different action if desired. This interface was also programmed to ignore long presses, as would be seen if the driver was using the headrest as, well, a headrest.

A small user study with 16 participants was conducted to assess how well FabriCar performed under real-world conditions. When compared with performing the same tasks on touchscreen-based systems, the new method resulted in a greater than 300% decrease in eye distraction.

FabriCar may be limited to relatively simple interactions, and perhaps most of them could be replaced by simple buttons or sliders, but the integration with a vehicle’s interior is aesthetically pleasing. Given the huge boost in safety, perhaps future vehicles will incorporate at least some of their controls into the interior’s fabric.