Haptics

Exploring the neural basis of affiliative touch and its application in haptic technology for emotional regulation and wellbeing.

Tactile Comfort Objects project attempts to sample the type of objects that give people comfort through touch – like a childhood teddy bear or a cozy hierloom blanket. We aim to understand what makes these objects special and how they can be a source of emotional support, when and how do people interact with such objects, and what effect does interactions with such objects entail?

We analyzed decade of Affective Haptics work and present our analysis and open challenges.

Introducing Synchrobots for enhancing online collaboration by translating participants’ biophysiological signals, fostering group connectedness, and combating “zoom fatigue.”.

With prior work in emotion regulation research, we understood that adaptive cognitive strategies like cognitive reappraisal are well-studied and form the basis of evidence-based therapies. In fact, individuals implementing such strategies can bear long-term benefits in terms of resilience and emotional stability.

With the rise of online collaboration, we’ve witnessed an increase in what’s commonly known as “zoom fatigue.” This phenomenon is characterized by reduced satisfaction, creativity, and energy during virtual meetings.

We explored and implemented haptic guidance strategies and tool-tip effects that aid digital colouring experiences.

In this project, we took a deep dive into affective haptics research from the last decade aiming to anlayse applied research build on the bi-directional connection between touch and emotions.

As a primary contribution, this thesis demonstrates the usability of toes as an ordered ten-unit tactile display; this can significantly increase the extent of information communicated via the feet. As a secondary contribution, it presents a novel design of haptic-augmented shoes for facilitating dance learning; this adds to the research direction of haptic-assisted guidance and motor learning.

We designed HapToes, a novel ten-digit spatial mapping of numeric information to the toes, which overcomes inter-toe discrimination ambiguity.