Remote experimentation using a smartphone application with haptic feedback

This paper presents the development of a remote experimentation for automatic control engineering education. By using a smartphone application, students can interact with real laboratory didactic equipment. Through a friendly graphical user interface and information provided by built-in smartphone sensors, students can modify the process parameters and verify in real time what's happening on the experimental setup. Mobile device vibration technology is used to add haptic tactile feedback to the application. This additional sense complements the visual and hearing information the user usually acquires when performing a practical experience. Therefore, students pay more attention to the results achieved online. Taking advantage of today's smartphone technological features, the students feel highly motivated to use this device to achieve improvements in their learning process. To reach a great number of users, the application runs across the most widely used mobile platforms. All user lab activities are stored in a database for the teacher later analysis. Likewise, students can store the resulted experiments on their mobile device when finished in order to make an off-line result analysis.