Academic literature on the topic 'High-visibility vests'

This paper presents findings from a research study into the role that communication plays in the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs), including a literature review, a hypothesis, and a case study testing our hypothesis. Many governments and road authorities lack capital or have not made it a priority to implement full VRU safety measures, with many gaps in VRU infrastructure and networks. These gaps leave VRUs to take safety into their own hands, including use of conspicuity aids such as high-visibility wear, helmets, bells, and lights with differing levels of effectiveness. The knowledge gap regarding the conventional wisdom, “be safe, be seen,” is the absence of communication and comprehension between road users (VRUs and vehicles). We hypothesize that communication aids are equally, if not more important than visibility aids for VRU safety. A case study was conducted to measure the effectiveness of several Hi-Viz safety vest designs including online surveys and separate in-field experiments using Instrumented Probe Bicycles. The results suggest that Hi-Viz safety vests using arrow designs (ArroWhere’s proprietary products and designs) similar to those found in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) can increase VRU safety until road authorities can fully fund and complete proper and sustainable VRU networks.

To support worker and driver safety, this study conducted a comprehensive literature review to identify methods of enhancing TMA visibility, improving work zone configurations, and ensuring worker safety. To increase TMA recognition, this study observed that the use of a 6-to-8-inch wide yellow and black inverted ‘V’ pattern of retroreflective chevron markings, sloped at a 45-degree angle downward in both directions from the upper center of a rear panel is effective in alerting drivers to work zones. This study also recommends applying amber and white warning LEDs, which flash in an asynchronous pattern at a 1 Hz frequency and are mounted against a solid-colored background for a 360-degree view visible at least 1500 feet from the work zone. In addition, a work zone vehicle configuration consisting of a lead, buffer, and advance warning truck with a buffer space between 100 and 150 ft is suggested to reduce the risk of lateral intrusions and TMA roll-ahead. In parallel, workers should wear high-visibility vests noticeable at a minimum distance of 1000 feet and headwear with at least 10 square inches of retroreflective material. Some intelligent transport systems are also suggested to enhance TMA recognition and potentially minimize work zone fatalities. Application of the recommended guidelines will potentially improve current practices and significantly reduce the occurrence of TMA crashes in construction and maintenance work zones.

The construction industry is one of the most dangerous industries in the world due to workers being vulnerable to accidents, injuries and even death. Therefore, how to effectively manage the appropriate usage of personal protective equipment (PPE) is an important research issue. In this study, deep learning is applied to the PPE inspection model to verify whether construction workers are equipped in accordance with the regulations, and this is expected to reduce the probability of related occupational disasters caused by the inappropriate use of PPE. The method is based on the YOLOv3, YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 algorithms to detect worker’s helmets and high-visibility vests from images or videos in real time. The model was trained on a new PPE dataset collected and organized by this study; the dataset contains 11,000 images and 88,725 labels. According to the test results, can achieve a 97% mean average precision (mAP) and 25 frames per second (FPS). The research result shows that the detection and counting data in this method have performed well and can be applied to the real-time PPE detection of workers at the construction job site.

Safety service patrols operate in more than 40 states and territories in the United States and each program operates with unique vehicles, uniforms, and equipment. Despite the variety of operator uniforms, legal and technical requirements at a national level dictate some choices, though color and style are largely at the discretion of states. Past research confirms that high-visibility safety apparel (HVSA) increases visibility. Biomotion markers on the joints further enhance visibility. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices specifies that personnel working in the right-of-way wear a Class 2 or 3 HVSA. A survey of states where service patrols operate found the majority use high-visibility yellow-green over red-orange, and Class 3 garments are preferred over Class 2. In relation to the base uniform, there is a mixture of maintenance-type uniforms, polo shirts, and no uniform specification at all. In a survey of Florida service patrol program managers and operators, conveying professionalism, comfort, and safety were the most valued aspects of uniforms. Operators understand the need to care and maintain HVSA, but may overestimate their ability to be seen at night by between two and four times the actual distance they are visible. When given a choice, operators preferred dark trousers with biomotion markers, though they were roughly split between the polo shirt/vest option and the integrated HVSA shirt that does not require use of a vest. A uniform protective outerwear was favored by almost all operators, and a ball cap was the headwear of choice.

The French social movement known as the Yellow Vests has produced intense visuals around the “accessory” from which it takes its name. Since November 17, 2018, the yellow safety vest has become both a visual sign of collective identification and a medium for textual and iconographic expression. In the article, we address the various forms of representation in which it has been both the vehicle and the object as an emblem of the movement. We examine these representations as carriers of written and visual inscriptions that were not only documented extensively but also helped to shape the image of the movement. Finally, we analyze the yellow high-visibility vest as a motif that proliferated in public spheres, both urban and peripheral, and in the digital realm. Through all these regimes of representation, the Yellow Vests have implemented a series of reactions to the liberal policies that oppress them and have reacted to the discourses fabricated against them by the media, and they have reactivated and challenged the image of the crowd. In this way, the Yellow Vests movement appears as a context for emancipation through their self-representation and self-mediation.

Abstract The effectiveness of the smoke control strategy plays an important role in increasing safety levels when fire accidents occur in road tunnels. This paper introduces clarifications about how the efficiency of smoke extraction control using solid curtains can be increased by placing smoke extraction vents close to the solid curtains. The effect of adding a solid curtain with different heights and at various positions relative to a smoke extraction vent was studied in this paper. A 14.3% increase in the vent flowrate occurs at the time corresponding to the fire peak heat release rate when the distance between the solid curtain and the vent is equivalent to 90% of the tunnel height and when the solid curtain height is equal to 16% of the tunnel height. High temperature and low visibility conditions occur near the solid curtain at the smoke-trapped area when the smoke curtain height exceeds 40% of the tunnel height. Using a solid curtain positioned far away from the vent with a distance equals to 90% of the tunnel height and with a height in the range from 16% to 30% of the tunnel height achieves the best results in terms of suppression of smoke spread and attaining acceptable visibility and temperature levels at the region where the smoke is trapped by the solid curtain.

Abstract The effects of officer appearance on public perceptions of police have been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. Little known research, however, has explored such effects on officers’ perceptions of each other. As part of the present research, we complement previous literature by testing the perceptual effects of uniforms and accoutrements among a sample of sworn police officers (N = 238) from the Queensland Police Service. Our results reveal that different types of attire (e.g. uniform or civilian), different styles of uniforms (e.g. light blue shirt or dark blue shirt), different accoutrements (e.g. high-visibility vest or sunglasses), and different bodily manipulations (e.g. sleeve tattoo) can impact officers’ perceptions of each other along various outcomes, including accountability, aggression, approachability, competency, friendliness, intimidation, professionalism, respectfulness, and trustworthiness. We discuss our results with respect to policing research, policy, and practice.

What we wear signals our membership within groups, be theyorganised by gender, class, ethnicity or religion. Simultaneously our clothing signifies hierarchies and power relations that sustain dominant power structures. How we dress is an expression of our identity. For Veblen, how we dress expresses wealth and social stratification. In imitating the fashion of the wealthy, claims Simmel, we seek social equality. For Barthes, clothing is embedded with systems of meaning. For Hebdige, clothing has modalities of meaning depending on the wearer, as do clothes for gender (Davis) and for the body (Entwistle). For Maynard, “dress is a significant material practice we use to signal our cultural boundaries, social separations, continuities and, for the present purposes, political dissidences” (103). Clothing has played a central role in historical and contemporary forms of political dissent. During the French Revolution dress signified political allegiance. The “mandated costumes, the gold-braided coat, white silk stockings, lace stock, plumed hat and sword of the nobility and the sober black suit and stockings” were rejected as part of the revolutionary struggle (Fairchilds 423). After the storming of the Bastille the government of Paris introduced the wearing of the tricolour cockade, a round emblem made of red, blue and white ribbons, which was a potent icon of the revolution, and a central motif in building France’s “revolutionary community”. But in the aftermath of the revolution divided loyalties sparked power struggles in the new Republic (Heuer 29). In 1793 for example anyone not wearing the cockade was arrested. Specific laws were introduced for women not wearing the cockade or for wearing it in a profane manner, resulting in six years in jail. This triggered a major struggle over women’s abilities to exercise their political rights (Heuer 31).Clothing was also central to women’s political struggles in America. In the mid-nineteenth century, women began wearing the “reform dress”—pants with shortened, lightweight skirts in place of burdensome and restrictive dresses (Mas 35). The wearing of pants, or bloomers, challenged gender norms and demonstrated women’s agency. Women’s clothes of the period were an "identity kit" (Ladd Nelson 22), which reinforced “society's distinctions between men and women by symbolizing their natures, roles, and responsibilities” (Ladd Nelson 22, Roberts 555). Men were positioned in society as “serious, active, strong and aggressive”. They wore dark clothing that “allowed movement, emphasized broad chests and shoulders and presented sharp, definite lines” (Ladd Nelson 22). Conversely, women, regarded as “frivolous, inactive, delicate and submissive, dressed in decorative, light pastel coloured clothing which inhibited movement, accentuated tiny waists and sloping shoulders and presented an indefinite silhouette” (Ladd Nelson 22, Roberts 555). Women who challenged these dress codes by wearing pants were “unnatural, and a perversion of the “true” woman” (Ladd Nelson 22). For Crane, the adoption of men’s clothing by women challenged dominant values and norms, changing how women were seen in public and how they saw themselves. The wearing of pants came to “symbolize the movement for women's rights” (Ladd Nelson 24) and as with women in France, Victorian society was forced to consider “women's rights, including their right to choose their own style of dress” (Ladd Nelson 23). As Yangzom (623) puts it, clothing allows groups to negotiate boundaries. How the “embodiment of dress itself alters political space and civic discourse is imperative to understanding how resistance is performed in creating social change” (Yangzom 623). Fig. 1: 1850s fashion bloomersIn a different turn is presented in Mahatma Gandhi’s Khadi movement. Khadi is a term used for fabrics made on a spinning wheel (or charkha) or hand-spun and handwoven, usually from cotton fibre. Khadi is considered the “fabric of Indian independence” (Jain). Gandhi recognised the potential of the fabric to a self-reliant, independent India. Gandhi made the struggle for independence synonymous with khadi. He promoted the materials “simplicity as a social equalizer and made it the nation’s fabric” (Sinha). As Jain notes, clothing and in this case fabric, is a “potent sign of resistance and change”. The material also reflects consciousness and agency. Khadi was Gandhi’s “own sartorial choices of transformation from that of an Englishman to that of one representing India” (Jain). For Jain the “key to Khadi becoming a successful tool for the freedom struggle” was that it was a “material embodiment of an ideal” that “represented freedom from colonialism on the one hand and a feeling of self-reliance and economic self-sufficiency on the other”. Fig. 2: Gandhi on charkha The reappropriating of Khadi as a fabric of political dissent echoes the wearing of blue denim by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the 1963 National Mall Washington march where 250,000 people gather to hear Martin Luther King speak. The SNCC formed in 1960 and from then until the 1963 March on Washington they developed a “style aesthetic that celebrated the clothing of African American sharecroppers” (Ford 626). A critical aspect civil rights activism by African America women who were members of the SNCC was the “performance of respectability”. With the moral character of African American women under attack (as a way of delegitimising their political activities), the female activists “emphasized the outward display of their respectability in order to withstand attacks against their characters”. Their modest, neat “as if you were going to church” (Chappell 96) clothing choices helped them perform respectability and this “played an important performative role in the black freedom struggle” (Ford 626). By 1963 however African American female civil rights activists “abandoned their respectable clothes and processed hairstyles in order to adopt jeans, denim skirts, bib-and-brace overalls”. The adoption of bib-and-brace overalls reflected the sharecropper's blue denim overalls of America’s slave past.For Komar the blue denim overalls “dramatize[d] how little had been accomplished since Reconstruction” and the overalls were practical to fix from attack dog tears and high-pressure police hoses. The blue denim overalls, according to Komar, were also considered to be ‘Negro clothes’ purchased by “slave owners bought denim for their enslaved workers, partly because the material was sturdy, and partly because it helped contrast them against the linen suits and lace parasols of plantation families”. The clothing choice was both practical and symbolic. While the ‘sharecropper’ narrative is problematic as ‘traditional’ clothing (something not evident in the case of Ghandi’s Khandi Movement, there is an emotion associated with the clothing. As Barthes (6-7) has shown, what makes ‘traditional clothing,’ traditional is that it is part of a normative system where not only does clothing have its historical place, but it is governed by its rules and regimentation. Therefore, there is a dialectical exchange between the normative system and the act of dressing where as a link between the two, clothing becomes the conveyer of its meanings (7). Barthes calls this system, langue and the act of dressing parole (8). As Ford does, a reading of African American women wearing what she calls a “SNCC Skin” “the uniform [acts] consciously to transgress a black middle-class worldview that marginalised certain types of women and particular displays of blackness and black culture”. Hence, the SNCC women’s clothing represented an “ideological metamorphosis articulated through the embrace and projection of real and imagined southern, working-class, and African American cultures. Central to this was the wearing of the blue denim overalls. The clothing did more than protect, cover or adorn the body it was a conscious “cultural and political tool” deployed to maintain a movement and build solidarity with the aim of “inversing the hegemonic norms” via “collective representations of sartorial embodiment” (Yangzom 622).Fig. 3: Mississippi SNCC March Coordinator Joyce Ladner during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom political rally in Washington, DC, on 28 Aug. 1963Clothing in each of these historical examples performs an ideological function that can bridge, that is bring diverse members of society together for a cause, or community cohesion or clothing can act as a fence to keep identities separate (Barnard). This use of clothing is evident in two indigenous examples. For Maynard (110) the clothes worn at the 1988 Aboriginal ‘Long March of Freedom, Justice and Hope’ held in Australia signalled a “visible strength denoted by coherence in dress” (Maynard 112). Most noted was the wearing of colours – black, red and yellow, first thought to be adopted during protest marches organised by the Black Protest Committee during the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane (Watson 40). Maynard (110) describes the colour and clothing as follows:the daytime protest march was dominated by the colours of the Aboriginal people—red, yellow and black on flags, huge banners and clothing. There were logo-inscribed T-shirts, red, yellow and black hatband around black Akubra’s, as well as red headbands. Some T-shirts were yellow, with images of the Australian continent in red, others had inscriptions like 'White Australia has a Black History' and 'Our Land Our Life'. Still others were inscribed 'Mourn 88'. Participants were also in customary dress with body paint. Older Indigenous people wore head bands inscribed with the words 'Our Land', and tribal elders from the Northern Territory, in loin cloths, carried spears and clapping sticks, their bodies marked with feathers, white clay and red ochres. Without question, at this most significant event for Aboriginal peoples, their dress was a highly visible and cohesive aspect.Similar is the Tibetan Freedom Movement, a nonviolent grassroots movement in Tibet and among Tibet diaspora that emerged in 2008 to protest colonisation of Tibet. It is also known as the ‘White Wednesday Movement’. Every Wednesday, Tibetans wear traditional clothes. They pledge: “I am Tibetan, from today I will wear only Tibetan traditional dress, chuba, every Wednesday”. A chuba is a colourful warm ankle-length robe that is bound around the waist by a long sash. For the Tibetan Freedom Movement clothing “symbolically functions as a nonverbal mechanism of communication” to “materialise consciousness of the movement” and functions to shape its political aims (Yangzom 622). Yet, in both cases – Aboriginal and Tibet protests – the dress may “not speak to single cultural audience”. This is because the clothing is “decoded by those of different political persuasions, and [is] certainly further reinterpreted or reframed by the media” (Maynard 103). Nevertheless, there is “cultural work in creating a coherent narrative” (Yangzom 623). The narratives and discourse embedded in the wearing of a red, blue and white cockade, dark reform dress pants, cotton coloured Khadi fabric or blue denim overalls is likely a key feature of significant periods of political upheaval and dissent with the clothing “indispensable” even if the meaning of the clothing is “implied rather than something to be explicated” (Yangzom 623). On 21 January 2017, 250,000 women marched in Washington and more than two million protesters around the world wearing pink knitted pussy hats in response to the remarks made by President Donald Trump who bragged of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’. The knitted pink hats became the “embodiment of solidarity” (Wrenn 1). For Wrenn (2), protests such as this one in 2017 complete with “protest visuals” which build solidarity while “masking or excluding difference in the process” indicates “a tactical sophistication in the social movement space with its strategic negotiation of politics of difference. In formulating a flexible solidarity, the movement has been able to accommodate a variety of races, classes, genders, sexualities, abilities, and cultural backgrounds” (Wrenn 4). In doing so they presented a “collective bodily presence made publicly visible” to protest racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic white masculine power (Gokariksel & Smith 631). The 2017 Washington Pussy Hat March was more than an “embodiment tactic” it was an “image event” with its “swarms of women donning adroit posters and pink pussy hats filling the public sphere and impacting visual culture”. It both constructs social issues and forms public opinion hence it is an “argumentative practice” (Wrenn 6). Drawing on wider cultural contexts, as other acts of dissent note here do, in this protest with its social media coverage, the “master frame” of the sea of pink hats and bodies posited to audiences the enormity of the anger felt in the community over attacks on the female body – real or verbal. This reflects Goffman’s theory of framing to describe the ways in which “protestors actively seek to shape meanings such that they spark the public’s support and encourage political openings” (Wrenn 6). The hats served as “visual tropes” (Goodnow 166) to raise social consciousness and demonstrate opposition. Protest “signage” – as the pussy hats can be considered – are a visual representation and validation of shared “invisible thoughts and emotions” (Buck-Coleman 66) affirming Georg Simmel’s ideas about conflict; “it helps individuals define their differences, establish to which group(s) they belong, and determine the degrees to which groups are different from each other” (Buck-Coleman 66). The pink pussy hat helped define and determine membership and solidarity. Further embedding this was the hand-made nature of the hat. The pattern for the hat was available free online at https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/. The idea began as one of practicality, as it did for the reform dress movement. This is from the Pussy Hat Project website:Krista was planning to attend the Women’s March in Washington DC that January of 2017 and needed a cap to keep her head warm in the chill winter air. Jayna, due to her injury, would not be able to attend any of the marches, but wanted to find a way to have her voice heard in absentia and somehow physically “be” there. Together, a marcher and a non-marcher, they conceived the idea of creating a sea of pink hats at Women’s Marches everywhere that would make both a bold and powerful visual statement of solidarity, and also allow people who could not participate themselves – whether for medical, financial, or scheduling reasons — a visible way to demonstrate their support for women’s rights. (Pussy Hat Project)In the tradition of “craftivism” – the use of traditional handcrafts such as knitting, assisted by technology (in this case a website with the pattern and how to knit instructions), as a means of community building, skill-sharing and action directed towards “political and social causes” (Buszek & Robertson 197) –, the hand-knitted pink pussy hats avoided the need to purchase clothing to show solidarity resisting the corporatisation of protest clothing as cautioned by Naomi Klein (428). More so by wearing something that could be re-used sustained solidarity. The pink pussy hats provided a counter to the “incoherent montage of mass-produced clothing” often seen at other protests (Maynard 107). Everyday clothing however does have a place in political dissent. In late 2018, French working class and middle-class protestors donned yellow jackets to protest against the government of French President Emmanuel Macron. It began with a Facebook appeal launched by two fed-up truck drivers calling for a “national blockade” of France’s road network in protest against rising fuel prices was followed two weeks later with a post urging motorist to display their hi-vis yellow vests behind their windscreens in solidarity. Four million viewed the post (Henley). Weekly protests continued into 2019. The yellow his-vis vests are compulsorily carried in all motor cars in France. They are “cheap, readily available, easily identifiable and above all representing an obligation imposed by the state”. The yellow high-vis vest has “proved an inspired choice of symbol and has plainly played a big part in the movement’s rapid spread” (Henley). More so, the wearers of the yellow vests in France, with the movement spreading globally, are winning in “the war of cultural representation. Working-class and lower middle-class people are visible again” (Henley). Subcultural clothing has always played a role as heroic resistance (Evans), but the coloured dissent dressing associated with the red, blue and white ribboned cockades, the dark bloomers of early American feminists, the cotton coloured natural fabrics of Ghandi’s embodiment of resistance and independence, the blue denim sharecropper overalls worn by African American women in their struggles for civil rights, the black, red and orange of Aboriginal protestors in Australia and the White Wednesday performances of resistance undertaken by Tibetans against Chinese colonisation, the Washington Pink Pussy Hat marches for gender respect and equality and the donning of every yellow hi-vis vests by French protestors all posit the important role of fabric and colour in protest meaning making and solidarity building. It is in our rage we consciously wear the colours and fabrics of dissent dress. ReferencesBarnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. New York: Routledge, 1996. 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Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.Evans, Caroline. “Dreams That Only Money Can Buy ... Or the Shy Tribe in Flight from Discourse.” Fashion Theory 1.2 (1997): 169-88.Fairchilds, Cissie. “Fashion and Freedom in the French Revolution.” Continuity and Change 15.3 (2000): 419-33.Ford, Tanisha C. “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress.” The Journal of Southern History 79.3 (2013): 625-58.Gökarıksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. “Intersectional Feminism beyond U.S. Flag, Hijab and Pussy Hats in Trump’s America.” Gender, Place & Culture 24.5 (2017): 628-44.Goodnow, Trischa. “On Black Panthers, Blue Ribbons, & Peace Signs: The Function of Symbols in Social Campaigns.” Visual Communication Quarterly 13 (2006): 166-79.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 2002. Henley, Jon. “How Hi-Vis Yellow Vest Became Symbol of Protest beyond France: From Brussels to Basra, Gilets Jaunes Have Brought Visibility to People and Their Grievances.” The Guardian 21 Dec. 2018. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yellow-vest-became-symbol-of-protest-beyond-france-gilets-jaunes>.Heuer, Jennifer. “Hats On for the Nation! Women, Servants, Soldiers and the ‘Sign of the French’.” French History 16.1 (2002): 28-52.Jain, Ektaa. “Khadi: A Cloth and Beyond.” Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal & Gandhi Research Foundation. ND. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/khadi-a-cloth-and-beyond.html>. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, London, 2000. Komar, Marlen. “What the Civil Rights Movement Has to Do with Denim: The History of Blue Jeans Has Been Whitewashed.” 30 Oct. 2017. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.racked.com/2017/10/30/16496866/denim-civil-rights-movement-blue-jeans-history>.Ladd Nelson, Jennifer. “Dress Reform and the Bloomer.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.1 (2002): 21-25.Maynard, Margaret. “Dress for Dissent: Reading the Almost Unreadable.” Journal of Australian Studies 30.89 (2006): 103-12. Pussy Hat Project. “Design Interventions for Social Change.” 20 Dec. 2018. <https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/>.Roberts, Helene E. “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman.” Signs (1977): 554-69.Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541–58.Sinha, Sangita. “The Story of Khadi, India's Signature Fabric.” Culture Trip 2018. 18 Jan. 2019 <https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/the-story-of-khadi-indias-fabric/>.Yangzom, Dicky. “Clothing and Social Movements: Tibet and the Politics of Dress.” Social Movement Studies 15.6 (2016): 622-33. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Dover Thrift, 1899. Watson, Lilla. “The Commonwealth Games in Brisbane 1982: Analysis of Aboriginal Protests.” Social Alternatives 7.1 (1988): 1-19.Wrenn, Corey. “Pussy Grabs Back: Bestialized Sexual Politics and Intersectional Failure in Protest Posters for the 2017 Women’s March.” Feminist Media Studies (2018): 1-19.

Multisensory tactile displays have enabled Soldiers to communicate covertly during strenuous movements and to navigate in low visibility conditions, while allowing Soldiers to keep their hands on their weapons and their eyes on their surroundings. The full potential of these multisensory systems to reduce Soldier cognitive load and enhance performance has yet to be determined, but shows great promise, particularly in situations where there is degraded visual acuity, high noise, and/or need for audio silence. Improvements in tactor technology include more distinctive and varied tactile sensations that are expected to allow recognition of a greater range of tactile cues and simultaneous presentation of two types of signals (e.g., navigation and alerts). The current study assessed the operational effectiveness of a tactile display integrated with a gesture recognition glove for automated detection of Soldier hand and arm signals, which were transmitted and displayed as tactile patterns on a haptic feedback vest. This study indicated that the integration of glove-based gesture recognition and a tactile display resulted in faster and more accurately perceived communications than traditional Army hand and arm signals. Given these recent technology developments and their potential, there is a corresponding opportunity for basic and applied research to address issues arising from these multisensory displays.