Affective Haptics Applications
At SPIN, we are designing to apply affective haptic technologies in practice for applications such as facilitating emotion regulation, supporting synchronization during remote work, and many more.
Happraisal (2022-present): Adaptive emotion regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal hold promise for long-term resilience and well-being. Crucially, it must be feasible to apply strategies learned in a “safe” environment in intense moments, by individuals for whom factors such as anxiety, trauma or mental illness may further block access to cognitive resources. While technological interventions such as chatbots assist in learning reappraisal techniques, text-based supports become inaccessible during an interpersonal exchange or with difficulties in emotional verbalization and lack the emotional salience of comforting touch. Building on established links between touch, emotion and cognition, this project aims to understand the impact of a person’s haptic interaction with an animate, affective, zoomorphic robot on their cognitive reappraisal success. We created a prototype of a CHORA, a “comforting haptic co-regulating adjunct” by adapting our lab’s existing haptic robots (simple, expressive, low-cost and physically robust) and adding our recently developed soft multichannel affective touch sensors. From an iterative design-evaluation cycle grounded in psychology theory, we anticipate outcomes including insights into the role of haptic interaction in facilitating the cognitive reappraisal process and a proven platform on which to continue this work. These findings will advance our understanding of haptic interaction in emotion regulation processes, and further the development of social robots as emotion co-regulators.
Touchable Comfort Objects (2022-present): This project investigates the touchable comfort objects that individuals incorporate into their day-to-day emotion-regulatory processes. It aims to identify the unique qualities (tactility, design, shape, personal value) of these objects and the type of touch interactions individuals have with them (duration, frequency, timing) that contribute to their ability to provide comfort and regulate emotions. Particularly, understanding when individuals seek interactions with comfort objects, what it entails, and how they integrate these interactions into their broader emotional regulation strategies. The study also examines the extent to which the narrative or story surrounding a comfort object contributes to its emotional and nostalgic significance and proposes ways to incorporate similar narrative elements into haptic ER technology. With responses collected from a diverse cultural pool through a survey and follow-up interviews, we aim to identify unique personas of individuals and their comfort object characteristics and establish design guidelines, recommendations, and technical requirements for touch-based emotion regulation technologies used in situ.
Affective Haptic System Design Review (completed): We conducted a scoping review and conceptual analysis with a design lens, identifying 110 papers from the last decade in 11 ACM and IEEE venues that regularly attract AHSD work. Our analysis identified 38 dimensions within 8 facets: demographic, theoretical grounding, impact, system specification, usage specification, ethical consideration, technology, and evaluation. The affective haptic system design dataset generated from this review is a collection of 110 coded papers from the last decade on the topic of Affective Haptic Systems Design (AHSD). These papers were collected from 11 ACM and IEEE venues that regularly feature AHSD research. Our scoping review and conceptual analysis, with a design lens, identified a dimensional space consisting of 38 dimensions within 8 facets: demographic, theoretical grounding, impact, system specification, usage specification, ethical considerations, technology, and evaluation. This dataset is generated by coding the 110 papers by three Computer Science researchers using the dimensional framework. It informs trends, disciplinary mixing, and topical focus of AHSD research over time. We hope that this dataset serves as a useful resource for researchers in the field of AHSD to explore and query the past decade of research. Explore the dataset at https://osf.io/kg2sm/
Synchrobots (completed)
The increased prevalence of online collaborative work, through necessity or preference, is accompanied by measurable drops in satisfaction, creativity and energy, often termed “zoom fatigue.” As loss of physical co-presence and associated nonverbal communication are identified as contributors, in this work we studied Synchrobots – robots designed to channel human biophysiology for group connectedness.