Affective touch is a crucial element of early human development, social bonding, and emotional support. Technically and socially difficult to study, it has received little research attention. Our ...approach employs animal models instantiated by the Haptic Creature, a touch-centric social robot. In this paper, we examine how humans communicate emotional state through touch to the Haptic Creature and their expectations of its reactions. A user study is presented where participants selected and performed gestures they would likely use when conveying nine different emotions to the Haptic Creature. We report a touch dictionary compiled for our research; the gestures participants chose from it; and video analysis of their enactment. Our principal findings regard patterns of gesture use for emotional expression; physical properties of the likely gestures; expectations for the Haptic Creature’s response to mirror the emotion communicated; and analysis of the human’s higher intent in communication. From the latter finding, we present five tentative categories of “intent” that overlap emotion states:
protective
,
comforting
,
restful
,
affectionate
, and
playful
. These results can help inform the future design of social robots by illuminating details of one direction in affective touch interactions.
An emerging view in cognitive neuroscience holds that the extraction of emotional relevance from sensory experience extends beyond the centralized appraisal of sensation in associative brain regions, ...including frontal and medial‐temporal cortices. This view holds that sensory information can be emotionally valenced from the point of contact with the world. This view is supported by recent research characterizing the human affiliative touch system, which carries signals of soft, stroking touch to the central nervous system and is mediated by dedicated C‐tactile afferent receptors. This basic scientific research on the human affiliative touch system is informed by, and informs, technology design for communicating and regulating emotion through touch. Here, we review recent research on the basic biology and cognitive neuroscience of affiliative touch, its regulatory effects across the lifespan, and the factors that modulate it. We further review recent work on the design of haptic technologies, devices that stimulate the affiliative touch system, such as wearable technologies that apply the sensation of soft stroking or other skin‐to‐skin contact, to promote physiological regulation. We then point to future directions in interdisciplinary research aimed at both furthering scientific understanding and application of haptic technology for health and wellbeing.
Recent research on human touch supports an emerging view in cognitive neuroscience wherein peripheral sensory information can be emotionally valenced. Here we review recent research on affiliative touch, its regulatory effects, and the factors that modulate it. We further link this research to related work on the design of haptic technologies, devices that stimulate the affiliative touch system, such as wearable technologies that apply affiliative touch to promote physiological regulation.
Our poor understanding of the connection between haptic effect engineering – using controllable parameters like frequency, amplitude and rhythm – and how sensations are comprehended by end-users ...hinders effective design. Haptic facets (categories of attributes that characterize collection items in different ways) are a way to describe, navigate and analyze the cognitive frameworks by which users make sense of qualitative and affective characteristics of haptic sensations. Embedded in tools, they will provide designers and end-users interested in customization with a road-mapped perceptual and cognitive design space. We previously compiled five haptic facets based on how people describe vibrations: physical, sensory, emotional, metaphoric, and usage examples.
Here, we report a study in which we deployed these facets to identify underlying dimensions and cross-linkages in participants' perception of a 120-item vibration library. We show that the facets are crosslinked in people's minds, and discuss three scenarios where the facet-based organizational schemes, their linkages and consequent redundancies can support design, evaluation and personalization of expressive vibrotactile effects. Finally, we report between-subject variation (individual differences) and within-subject consistency (reliability) in participants' rating and tagging patterns to inform future progress on haptic evaluation. This facet-based approach is also applicable to other kinds of haptic sensations and even other modalities, and can inform multimodal experience design through a descriptive design language shared between different modalities.
•Empirically derived semantic dimensions of four VT facets.•Between-facet linkages at dimensional and tag levels, and their implications for VT design.•Analysis of individual variations in rating and annotating vibrations.•A two-step methodology for annotating large VT sets, and data on its validity and reliability.•A publicly available dataset of 120 vibrations and their annotations and dimensions.
Practical affect recognition needs to be efficient and unobtrusive in interactive contexts. One approach to a robust realtime system is to sense and automatically integrate multiple nonverbal ...sources. We investigated how users' touch , and secondarily gaze , perform as affect-encoding modalities during physical interaction with a robot pet, in comparison to more-studied biometric channels. To elicit authentically experienced emotions, participants recounted two intense memories of opposing polarity in Stressed - Relaxed or Depressed - Excited conditions. We collected data (N=30) from a touch sensor embedded under robot fur (force magnitude and location), a robot-adjacent gaze tracker (location), and biometric sensors (skin conductance, blood volume pulse, respiration rate). Cross-validation of Random Forest classifiers achieved best-case accuracy for combined touch-with-gaze approaching that of biometric results: where training and test sets include adjacent temporal windows, subject-dependent prediction was 94% accurate. In contrast, subject-independent Leave-One-participant-Out predictions resulted in 30% accuracy (chance 25%). Performance was best where participant information was available in both training and test sets. Addressing computational robustness for dynamic, adaptive realtime interactions, we analyzed subsets of our multimodal feature set, varying sample rates and window sizes. We summarize design directions based on these parameters for this touch-based, affective, and hard, realtime robot interaction application.
Touch is valued for supporting emotional bonds. How can people access its warmth and nuance remotely, when tech-mediated proxies are so different from direct touch? We assessed the viability of ...haptic animations as affect-embedded tactile messages, highlighting findings which demonstrate how crucial relationship and shared history is in influencing these expressions in design and interpretation. To investigate haptic messaging, we first identified a set of 10 common emotion-imbued scenarios by surveying 201 people in distance relationships. Then, using a novel prototype of a wearable spatial vibrotactile display, 10 intimate dyads designed 167 haptic encodings matching the provided scenarios plus 17 user-defined "wildcards". A week later, 21 individuals interpreted sentiment from encodings designed by themselves, a partner or a stranger. We examined design strategies, engagement, and compared human machine interpretation accuracy. A striking finding was participants' facile use of shared context when it was available, building on 'inside stories' to communicate subtle meanings with high effectiveness despite the unfamiliar medium, and doing so with evident fun. We analyze recognition accuracy and share insights on what it might take to make interpersonal haptic messaging work.
Robots are an opportunity for interactive and engaging learning activities. In this paper we consider the premise that haptic force feedback delivered through a held robot can enrich learning of ...science-related concepts by building physical intuition as learners design experiments and physically explore them to solve problems they have posed. Further, we conjecture that combining this rich feedback with pen-and-paper interactions,
e.g.
, to sketch experiments they want to try, could lead to fluid interactions and benefit focus. However, a number of technical barriers interfere with testing this approach, and making it accessible to learners and their teachers. In this paper, we propose a framework for Physically Assisted Learning based on stages of experiential learning which can guide designers in developing and evaluating effective technology, and which directs focus on how haptic feedback could assist with
design
and
explore
learning stages. To this end, we demonstrated a possible technical pathway to support the full experience of designing an experiment by drawing a physical system on paper, then interacting with it physically after the system recognizes the sketch, interprets as a model and renders it haptically. Our proposed framework is rooted in theoretical needs and current advances for experiential learning, pen-paper interaction and haptic technology. We further explain how to instantiate the PAL framework using available technologies and discuss a path forward to a larger vision of physically assisted learning.
Access to haptic technology is on the rise, in smartphones, virtual reality gear, and open-source education kits. However, engineers and interaction designers are often inexperienced in designing ...with haptics, and rarely have tools and guidelines for creating multisensory experiences. To examine the impact of this deficit, we supplied a haptic design kit, custom software, and technical support to nine teams (25 students) for an innovation challenge at a major haptics conference. Teams (predominantly undergraduate engineers with little haptics, interaction design, or education training) designed and built haptic environments to support learning of science topics. Qualitative analysis of surveys, interviews, team blogs, and expert assessments of teams' final demonstrations exposed three themes in these design efforts. 1) Novice teams tended to ignore many of ten design choices that experts navigate, such as explicitly choosing whether haptic and graphic feedback should reinforce versus complement one other. 2) Their design activities differed in timing and inclusion from the ten activities observed in expert process. 3) We identified three success strategies in how teams devised useful and engaging interactions and interpretable multimodal experiences, and communicated about their designs. We compare novice and expert design needs and highlight where future haptic design tools and theory need to support novice practice and training.
Do it yourself haptics: part I Hayward, Vincent; Maclean, Karon E.
IEEE robotics & automation magazine,
12/2007, Letnik:
14, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article is the first of a two-part series intended as an introduction to haptic interfaces. Together they provide a general introduction to haptic interfaces, their construction, and application ...design. Haptic interfaces comprise hardware and software components aiming at providing computer-controlled, programmable sensations of mechanical nature, i.e., pertaining to the sense of touch. In Part I, we describe methods that have been researched and developed to date to achieve the generation of haptic sensations, the means to construct experimental devices of modest complexity, and the software components needed to drive them. In Part II of this series, we will describe some basic concepts of haptic interaction design together with several interesting applications based on this technology.
When refining or personalizing a design, we count on being able to modify or move an element by changing its parameters rather than creating it anew in a different form or location—a standard utility ...in graphic and auditory authoring tools. Similarly, we need to tune vibrotactile sensations to fit new use cases, distinguish members of communicative icon sets, and personalize items. For tactile vibration display, however, we lack knowledge of the human perceptual mappings that must underlie such tools. Based on evidence that affective dimensions are a natural way to tune vibrations for practical purposes, we attempted to manipulate perception along three emotion dimensions ( agitation , liveliness , and strangeness ) using engineering parameters of hypothesized relevance. Results from two user studies show that an automatable algorithm can increase a vibration’s perceived agitation and liveliness to different degrees via signal energy, while increasing its discontinuity or randomness makes it more strange . These continuous mappings apply across diverse base vibrations; the extent of achievable emotion change varies. These results illustrate the potential for developing vibrotactile emotion controls as efficient tuning for designers and end-users.
Data tracking is a common feature of pain e-health applications, however, viewing visualizations of this data has not been investigated for its potential as an intervention itself. We conducted a ...pilot feasibility parallel randomized cross-over trial, 1:1 allocation ratio. Participants were youth age 12–18 years recruited from a tertiary-level pediatric chronic pain clinic in Western Canada. Participants completed two weeks of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data collection, one of which also included access to a data visualization platform to view their results. Order of weeks was randomized, participants were not masked to group assignment. Objectives were to establish feasibility related to recruitment, retention, and participant experience. Of 146 youth approached, 48 were eligible and consented to participation, two actively withdrew prior to the EMA. Most participants reported satisfaction with the process and provided feedback on additional variables of interest. Technical issues with the data collection platform impacted participant experience and data analysis, and only 48% viewed the visualizations. Four youth reported adverse events not related to visualizations. Data visualization offers a promising clinical tool, and patient experience feedback is critical to modifying the platform and addressing technical issues to prepare for deployment in a larger trial.
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