O'Malley, Marcia K2019-05-172019-11-012019-052019-04-18May 2019Dunkelberger, Nathan. "Conveying Language through a Multi-sensory Haptic Device." (2019) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105945">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105945</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105945Communication is a valuable resource that is a part of everyone's life. However, there are many cases where the resource of communication is not available, either due to saturation or impairment of the typical auditory or visual communication channels. Haptics, or the sense of touch, provides an alternative to these traditional channels. Furthermore, multi-sensory haptics provides the potential of displaying large amounts of haptic information in a small form factor by providing different types of tactile information. In this thesis, a multi-sensory haptic device is presented which uses lateral skin stretch, radial squeeze, and vibration components. In a cue identification task, the multi-sensory device performed better than a single-sensory device, encouraging the use of multi-sensory devices for language transmission. The device was then used for language transmission and subjects learned to understand English through the presentation of phonemes as haptic cues through a 100 minute training protocol.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.wearable hapticslanguage communicationmulti-sensory hapticstactile devicephoneme codingThesis2019-05-17