The Impact of Affective Haptic Design of Wearable Devices on Persian Users

Abstract

Evidence indicates haptic stimulation can effectively evoke emotions and can be utilized in communication technologies’ design. Due to the impact of culture on people’s tactile behaviours and lack of research in West Asian cultures, this study aims to investigate the impact of affective haptics in Persian users. Using a wearable prototype, a test is conducted on 78 users to evaluate the arousal and valence level of their 4 emotions (anger, happiness, relaxed and sadness) when exposed to text messages with and without haptic stimulation and to see if they can recognise the stimuli with given haptic patterns. A semi-focused interview is also done to evaluate the results further with qualitative feedbacks. Results show vibro-tactile stimuli increase the arousal level and reduce the valence level of the emotions; however, vibrotactile stimuli cannot convey the desired valence level as they cannot render the tactile patterns related to each emotion properly.