Elevator Touchscreen Input for Accessible Multi-Digit Floor Calls
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing elevator installations face challenges in meeting design, user-friendliness, and maintenance requirements, particularly in tall buildings, especially for passengers with physical disabilities, as they lack intuitive and reliable input methods for destination calls.
Innovation Solution
An elevator operating device with a touch-sensitive screen system that provides a graphic user interface with haptically perceptible feedback and voice messages, allowing passengers to input destination calls by touching call symbols and confirming inputs through defined actions, ensuring accessibility for both able-bodied and disabled users.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of repair
If a touch-sensitive screen system with a substantially smooth touch surface is used, then ease of maintenance is improved, but user-friendliness for passengers with physical disabilities deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces haptic feedback as an intermediary mechanism between the smooth touch surface and the user. When a passenger touches a call symbol, the system provides tactile feedback through the touch-sensitive screen, mediating the interaction to convey information about the selected symbol without requiring visible or textured buttons. This resolves the contradiction by maintaining the smooth surface for ease of maintenance while adding haptic feedback to ensure user-friendliness for passengers with visual impairments.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback by detecting touch input on the smooth screen and responding with haptically perceptible signals. This feedback loop allows passengers with physical disabilities to confirm their selections through tactile sensation, bridging the gap between the maintenance advantage of a smooth surface and the operational requirement for clear user feedback.
2Ease of operation
If a touch-sensitive screen system with haptically perceptible feedback is implemented, then user-friendliness for passengers with disabilities is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The touch-sensitive screen system serves multiple functions simultaneously: it displays visual information for sighted passengers, detects touch input locations, provides haptic feedback for tactile confirmation, and processes destination call inputs. By making the screen multi-functional, the system achieves improved user-friendliness without proportionally increasing complexity, as a single component performs several roles.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent merges the visual display function and tactile feedback function into a single integrated touch-sensitive screen system. Rather than adding separate buttons or indicators for haptic feedback, the system combines these functions in one device, reducing overall complexity while achieving the goal of improved user-friendliness for passengers with disabilities.
3Ease of operation
If voice messages are generated to indicate touched call symbols, then ease of operation for passengers with visual impairments is improved, but loss of information increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system provides feedback to passengers with visual impairments through voice messages that announce the touched call symbol and its associated destination floor. This auditory feedback loop compensates for the lack of visual confirmation, ensuring that passengers receive complete information about their input without needing to see the screen or button illumination.
Data Source
AI summary
An elevator operating device for a floor comprises a touch-sensitive screen. Call symbols are displayed on a user interface, one of which has to be touched in order to input a character stored for this call symbol. In order to enter a two-digit destination floor, the passenger leaves their finger on the touch surface after inputting a first character, whereby the elevator operating device recognizes that the passenger has limited vision. The elevator operating device registers a second character if it detects a confirmation action for the second character without recognizing that the finger has been lifted from the touch surface. As long as the finger is touching the touch surface, no destination call is generated; the destination call is only generated when the passenger lifts their finger, thus indicating that the input has been completed.