Intelligent Modality Selection for Navigation Systems

Portable electronic navigation systems are often used for directional guidance when humans need to navigate terrain quickly and accurately. Prior work in this field has focused on using either the visual or haptic sensory modality for providing such guidance, and results have indicated that either option may be preferable depending upon the user's specific needs. However, conventional methods involve selecting a single modality based on which will work best with the task the user is most likely to perform and using this modality throughout the duration of the navigation. In this paper, we describe the design and results of a study intended to evaluate the effectiveness of an adaptive modality selection algorithm that dynamically selects a navigation system's directional guidance modality while considering both task-specific benefits and the time-varying effects of switching cost, stimulus-specific adaptation, and habituation. Our findings indicate that use of this algorithm can improve user performance in the presence of multiple simultaneous tasks.