11

COMBAT TACTILE COMBAT TACTILE JACKETJACKET

B.S.R.PavanN.Venkata GoutamM. Rohit Patnaik

INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION Communication of

information among soldiers is critical for their survival.

The shoulder is used as input organ for transmitting the information.

A tactile language or message code has been designed specifically for communication among soldiers.

A tactor which senses the vibrations on skin is placed in shoulder pads

Shoulder as Input Device, Shoulder as Input Device, whywhy??The skin covering the torso and

shoulder is the most suitable place for TACTOR.

It contains hundreds of mechanoreceptors specialized for encoding tactile information.

The range and direction of information signals depends on the tactors placed on the shoulder region.

What are What are mechanorecptorsmechanorecptors??

A mechanoreceptor is a sensory receptor that responds to mechanical pressure or distortion.

Mechanoreceptors consists of different types of corpuscles as documented by Vangsness.

Out of many corpuscles, the important corpuscles are:

1. RUFFINI and 2. PACINI.

Error DetectionError Detection

Actuators are used for the purpose of error

detection.The amplitude to

frequency responses are obtained.

The mean and median overlap and standard deviation is also minimum at 175 Hz, hence, the error detection is minimum.

Design Of Shoulder Design Of Shoulder PadPad

The following are the important points in designing the pad:

1. It should not cause any impact on mobility of user.

2. The components of a shoulder pad should survive washing or dry cleaning.

3.To integrate all electronics in jacket without varying the outward appearance.

Tactor SelectionTactor Selection The tactor is suitable for this

purpose within the range 60 to 500 Hz.

Should not interfere with movements of body and work in all environments.

Since the motor has to be inserted into the wearable, it is not recommended to supply more than 4v.

Depending upon their characteristics two types of pancake tactors are selected.

WIRELESS COMMUNICATION WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMSYSTEM

Wireless kit KTGP418 was used for sending and receiving data at 418MHz.

The transmitter has four data inputs and the receiver has four momentary or latched outputs.

The transmitter and receiver use ED4GP encoder/decoder.

The maximum data rate that can be fed into the transmitter is 20 transitions per second.

A micro power low dropout voltage regulator IC2 drops and regulates the power source down to 5 volts.

Diode D1 protects against a reverse battery connection that would damage the regulator and other circuits.

Combat jacket featuresCombat jacket features Two main features are : 1.Combat tactile jacket button box. 2.Combat tactile jacket shape.A button-box was designed to enable a soldier to send signal to

the wearer of tactile jacket.A message code is associated with each combination of buttons. In order to give final shape to both the jackets, All the actuators

were placed at the required position and hand stitching was done.

The whole electronics was perfectly fitted, so as to hide and provide a normal look of the jacket.

USABILITY EXPERIMENTUSABILITY EXPERIMENT A CTJ has to satisfy mainly these points: 1. How soldiers react to tactile stimulus, as a

communication tool? 2.Can tactile interface usable together with

the uniform and other equipment? 3. Does CTJ cause any discomfort for the

users? The answers for these questions were divided

into three categories: 1.Tactile perception of CTJ 2.Comfort of CTJ 3. Other remarks of CTJ

CONCLUSIONCONCLUSIONThe experiments and surveys have given us

some results that confirm our assumptions that an artifact like combat tactile jacket can become useful in a military context.

The soldiers response was positive in using these CTJ’s to communicate information in an active military context.

The CTJ provided comfort to the soldiers and also the symbols were easy to remember.

We firmly believe that CTJ has much more to offer that can be realized only after extensive experiments.

Queries?????.....