Above and Below the Neck: The Silent Half of the Pilot
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The cockpit's bandwidth problem isn't on the screen. It's on the body that has been left silent.
Key takeaway: Cockpit warnings are concentrated into two sensory channels — vision and hearing — and both are now saturated. This causes cognitive overload in the cockpit, where alerts fire correctly but never reach the operator. Tactile communication adds an independent third channel, moving directional and monitoring cues to the body so displays stay clear and critical alerts get through.Modern crew stations — fighter cockpits, ground control stations, the interior of a buttoned-up armoured vehicle — share a single design instinct. When an operator needs to know something, the system shows it or says it: a symbol on the visor, a caution light, a tone, a voice in the headset. Decades of avionics and air-defence engineering have refined two channels, audio and vision, and both of them terminate above the neck.
That approach made sense while there was spare capacity to fill. That capacity is now gone.
What causes cognitive overload in the cockpit?
Cockpit cognitive overload is not caused by a shortage of information but by an excess of it. The F-35's sensor fusion engine merges six camera feeds into a single picture; helmet-mounted displays layer symbology over the world; radio, intercom and system alerts stack on top of one another. Each addition competes for the same two sensory channels already carrying the primary task.
Read more about this in our previous Blog Post!
Wickens' Multiple Resource Theory explains the mechanism. Attention is not a single reservoir but several, tied to specific senses. Two visual tasks interfere with each other; two auditory tasks interfere with each other. Adding a brighter warning to a saturated visual channel does not buy awareness — it adds competition. Beyond a threshold reached routinely in operations, more symbology degrades situational awareness rather than improving it.
The failure modes are measurable. In one controlled cockpit study, 39.3% of pilots failed to consciously register a critical auditory alarm — a phenomenon known as inattentional deafness. Its visual counterpart lets a threat sit in plain view on a display and never reach awareness, while attentional tunnelling locks focus onto a single stimulus as the rest of the picture falls away. In each case the warning fired correctly and the system worked as designed. The operator still missed it. A saturated channel cannot be relieved by adding more to it.
Interested in knowing more about cognitive overload? Read our latest Whitepaper!
The body below the neck: an unused sensory channel
While the field has fought for millimetres of visor space and decibels of audio headroom, an entire communication surface has sat unused: the body below the neck.
Tactile communication runs on the somatosensory system, a separate neural pathway that does not queue behind vision or hearing. A vibration on the torso does not compete with the head-up display for visual attention or with the radio for auditory processing.
Neuroscientists describe these as "bottom-up" signals: they interrupt at a pre-conscious level, directing attention without requiring the operator to search for and interpret anything first.
Vibrotactile cues reach awareness in roughly 130–155 ms, arriving up to about 45 ms ahead of the equivalent visual signal, and they remain legible when the other channels have failed — detectable through a flight suit or body armour, unaffected by 100 dB of rotor noise or a glare-washed visor.
The least-developed channel in the crew station is also the only one with capacity to spare.
Which cockpit information can move to a tactile channel?
For primes and OEMs, the opportunity is not "add haptics" but redistribution: deciding which information no longer needs to occupy a screen or the audio mix. Every cue moved to the body retires a symbol from the display and a tone from the headset. The screen grows quieter; the operator's eyes stay on the task.
The categories that translate cleanly to a tactile channel are the ones the body is naturally suited to carry:
Directional and spatial cues. The body is a native 360-degree map. A vibration on the left shoulder means "threat, left" — no coordinate to decode, no 2D display to rotate mentally into 3D space. In a simulated Gripen engagement, a directional tactile cue cut threat reaction time by 213 ms even under loads up to +9Gz. Threat bearing, spatial orientation and proximity are strong candidates to lift off the visor.
Progressive and trend-based states. Drift off course, gradual altitude loss, airspeed decaying toward stall, datalink degradation, airspace or flight-envelope proximity. A graduated vibrotactile nudge that escalates as a threshold approaches keeps the operator in the loop without a hard hand-back at the critical moment.
Background monitoring. Fuel state, system status, closing warnings. Information the eyes currently police can be felt instead, freeing bandwidth for decisions that require it.
Is tactile communication a replacement for cockpit displays?
No. Rich context and detailed imagery belong on the display; semantic, verbal content — air traffic control, complex categorical calls — belongs in audio. The evidence is consistent: a meta-analysis of 45 studies across navigation, targeting, cockpit and UAV tasks found vibrotactile cues delivered their strongest gains when they complemented the visual picture rather than replacing it.
Tactile communication is not a rival to the screen, but the third leg the multimodal cockpit interface has lacked.
Framed as redistribution, the value proposition changes. This is not another overlay competing for space on a crowded head-up display; it returns the one resource that cannot be manufactured — operator attention.
The measurable results follow: cleaner displays, over 60% fewer missed alerts in a simulated armoured-vehicle study, a directional channel that reached 91.3% accuracy under helicopter noise where spatialised audio collapsed to 53.1%, and a fallback that keeps working when vision and hearing are gone.
The signals were never the problem; they fired, flashed and sounded as designed. But all of them were aimed at the same two channels, and both were full.
The body has remained available throughout. Giving it a language is the next step in cockpit design.
About Touchwaves
Touchwaves is a Dutch deep-tech company and TNO spin-off based in Eindhoven, developing wearable haptic technology for aerospace and defence.
Its systems deliver information through touch — bypassing saturated visual and auditory channels — to support situational awareness and cognitive overload management in high-workload environments.
In January 2026, Touchwaves raised €1.5M in pre-seed funding led by SecFund (Dutch MoD), with participation from TNO Ventures, imec.istart, Joanna Invest and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The company works closely with the Dutch Ministry of Defence, the Royal Netherlands Air and Space Force, and the Centre for Man in Aviation.
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