Abstract
Touch as a modality in social communication has been getting more attention with recent developments in wearable technology and an increase in awareness of how limited physical contact can lead to touch starvation and feelings of depression. Although several mediated touch methods have been developed for conveying emotional support, the transfer of emotion through mediated touch has not been widely studied. This work addresses this need by exploring emotional communication through a novel wearable haptic system. The system records physical touch patterns through an array of force sensors, processes the recordings using novel gesture-based algorithms to create actuator control signals, and generates mediated social touch through an array of voice coil actuators. We conducted a human subject study (N= 20) to understand the perception and emotional components of this mediated social touch for common social touch gestures, including poking, patting, massaging, squeezing, and stroking. Our results show that the speed of the virtual gesture significantly alters the participants' ratings of valence, arousal, realism, and comfort of these gestures with increased speed producing negative emotions and decreased realism. The findings from the study will allow us to better recognize generic patterns from human mediated touch perception and determine how mediated social touch can be used to convey emotion. Our system design, signal processing methods, and results can provide guidance in future mediated social touch design.
Highlights
Long-distance communication has experienced a tremendous evolution in the past few decades
We develop a novel haptic system to examine the relationship between the mediated touch and emotion
We examine how users interpret the emotion of mediated social touch gestures and how these emotions can be manipulated by the speed of the gesture
Summary
Long-distance communication has experienced a tremendous evolution in the past few decades. Even with the ability to communicate online, over the phone, or through videochat, people can still experience feelings of loneliness or depression due to limited physical contact, especially under the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic (Tomova et al, 2020). These negative side-effects of touch starvation, a lack of physical contact with others, have been observed in elderly individuals, individuals in hospitals, and those who live alone (Tomaka et al, 2006; Klinenberg, 2016). Social touch is common in our everyday lives, it is currently not possible for individuals to physically interact with each other when spatially separated
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