Since publishing our Application Bulletin on how to secure vibration motors in flexible material, we’ve been thinking about more situations where they can be put to good use.

One notable suggestion was for improving motorcyclist safety. Cars and automobiles have different vibration alerting and haptic feedback features to provide drivers with safety information, however, the motors are typically mounted in the steering wheel or seat. For bikers, this is not much use as it would be difficult to differentiate between the vibrations from the bike and from the haptic feedback/vibration alerting system. Furthermore, the protective clothing would dampen the vibrations from the smaller motors such that they would not be practical.

Mounting the vibration motors into the bikers clothing overcomes these obstacles. This enables the use of safety features such as blind spot checking, lane drift alerting, or speeding warnings. These would require an extra step with wireless communication between the bike and rider, but simple signals can be sent via Bluetooth, near field communications, etc.

Given the importance of road safety, especially for bikers who are arguably at a higher risk, we think the extra investment would go a long way.