Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation as a Novel, Hands-Free, and Intuitive Interface Modality rfaces

Nominal battlefield conditions require that operators maintain mission objective/task performance under a variety of conditions, often where scenarios and/or environments severely manipulate, degrade, or otherwise generate impoverished sensory inputs and resulting percepts. The adaptation of advanced techniques to access novel sensory stimulation will significantly improve delivery of actionable data without continuing to add to the already populated visual and auditory mechanisms currently dominating human-machine interactions. The current state-of-the-art is focused on refining somatosensory stimulation systems (e.g. haptics, proprioceptive cuing, vibrotactile actuators, etc.). It is the position of this proposal, however, that the high number of applications for which this sensory pathway is being envisioned for will, ultimately, result in another polluted landscape, akin to visual/auditory. Under this context, this proposal identifies how engagement of the human vestibular system, via galvanic vestibular stimulation, establishes a low-cognitive, mostly unexplored means of providing extrasensory information to a user. It can be delivered with highly desirable low size, weight, and power (SWaP) traits, can be established as a wearable, is uniquely linked to multiple mechanisms of human performance (e.g. vestibulocochlear, vestibulooccular), and offers expansions into other challenging environments, namely, deep-sea, mining, and space where visual and spatial cues are limited.