How Does It Feel Like? An Exploratory Study of a Prototype System to Convey Emotion through Haptic Wearable Devices

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a portable, hands-free, wearable haptic device that maps the emotions evoked by the music in a movie into vibrations, with the aim that hearing-impaired audience can get a sense of the emotional content carried by the music in specific movie scenes, and therefore feel (hear) the music through the sense of touch. A study of the use of the technology is reported which found that high arousal and high valence were reliably conveyed through haptic patterns with high intensity and high frequency, whereas haptic patterns with low intensity and low frequency conveyed low arousal and low valence

Recognizing emotions induced by wearable haptic vibration using noninvasive electroencephalogram

The integration of haptic technology into affective computing has led to a new field known as affective haptics. Nonetheless, the mechanism underlying the interaction between haptics and emotions remains unclear. In this paper, we proposed a novel haptic pattern with adaptive vibration intensity and rhythm according to the volume, and applied it into the emotional experiment paradigm. To verify its superiority, the proposed haptic pattern was compared with an existing haptic pattern by combining them with conventional visual–auditory stimuli to induce emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and neutral), and the subjects’ EEG signals were collected simultaneously. The features of power spectral density (PSD), differential entropy (DE), differential asymmetry (DASM), and differential caudality (DCAU) were extracted, and the support vector machine (SVM) was utilized to recognize four target emotions. The results demonstrated that haptic stimuli enhanced the activity of the lateral temporal and prefrontal areas of the emotion-related brain regions. Moreover, the classification accuracy of the existing constant haptic pattern and the proposed adaptive haptic pattern increased by 7.71 and 8.60%, respectively. These findings indicate that flexible and varied haptic patterns can enhance immersion and fully stimulate target emotions, which are of great importance for wearable haptic interfaces and emotion communication through haptics