Haptic Coloring Platform for Practising Mindfulness

In this project we worked on designing and developing HaptiColour, a haptic-assisted colouring platform based on the Haply 2-DOF device and a graphical environment that aims to help individuals decrease anxiety and achieve mindfulness. Anxiety disorders impact almost everyone at some point in life. In the most severe cases the effects can be extremely detrimental to overall health and everyday life. Research has proven mindfulness-based activities, such as structured colouring, to be effective in reducing anxiety. As advocated by health care providers, stimulation of the sense of touch also helps to fight anxiety symptoms. We thus propose to leverage the Haply do-it-yourself (DIY) device to create an interactive platform capable of providing individuals with compelling haptic (touch) feedback while doing structured colouring. Using HaptiColour, individuals can colour mandalas and other geometric shapes while experiencing haptic sensations corresponding to different tool-tips and textures. We evaluated the performance of HaptiColour in an informal setting with hapticians and colleagues.

During this course, I wrote some blog posts as we fiddled with Haply (a force-feedback haptic platform). Check them out on medium!

If you are a graduate student in a Canadian University and interested in learning more about haptics would recommend checking out the CanHaptics Research Cluster through which this inter-university course was delivered. To get started on learning more about Haptics, you can also check out Learn Haptics, an initiative by fellow Hapticians.