A fabric-based approach for wearable haptics

In recent years, wearable haptic systems (WHS) have gained increasing attention as a novel and exciting paradigm for human-robot interaction (HRI).These systems can be worn by users, carried around, and integrated in their everyday lives, thus enabling a more natural manner to deliver tactile cues.At the same time, the design of these types of devices presents new issues: the challenge is the correct identification of design guidelines, with the two-fold goal of minimizing system encumbrance and increasing the effectiveness and naturalness of stimulus delivery.Fabrics can represent a viable solution to tackle these issues.They are specifically thought “to be worn”, and could be the key ingredient to develop wearable haptic interfaces conceived for a more natural HRI.In this paper, the author will review some examples of fabric-based WHS that can be applied to different body locations, and elicit different haptic perceptions for different application fields.Perspective and future developments of this approach will be discussed

Biosensing and Actuation—Platforms Coupling Body Input-Output Modalities for Affective Technologies

Research in the use of ubiquitous technologies, tracking systems and wearables within mental health domains is on the rise. In recent years, affective technologies have gained traction and garnered the interest of interdisciplinary fields as the research on such technologies matured. However, while the role of movement and bodily experience to affective experience is well-established, how to best address movement and engagement beyond measuring cues and signals in technology-driven interactions has been unclear. In a joint industry-academia effort, we aim to remodel how affective technologies can help address body and emotional self-awareness. We present an overview of biosignals that have become standard in low-cost physiological monitoring and show how these can be matched with methods and engagements used by interaction designers skilled in designing for bodily engagement and aesthetic experiences. Taking both strands of work together offers unprecedented design opportunities that inspire further research. Through first-person soma design, an approach that draws upon the designer’s felt experience and puts the sentient body at the forefront, we outline a comprehensive work for the creation of novel interactions in the form of couplings that combine biosensing and body feedback modalities of relevance to affective health. These couplings lie within the creation of design toolkits that have the potential to render rich embodied interactions to the designer/user. As a result we introduce the concept of “orchestration”. By orchestration, we refer to the design of the overall interaction: coupling sensors to actuation of relevance to the affective experience; initiating and closing the interaction; habituating; helping improve on the users’ body awareness and engagement with emotional experiences; soothing, calming, or energising, depending on the affective health condition and the intentions of the designer. Through the creation of a range of prototypes and couplings we elicited requirements on broader orchestration mechanisms. First-person soma design lets researchers look afresh at biosignals that, when experienced through the body, are called to reshape affective technologies with novel ways to interpret biodata, feel it, understand it and reflect upon our bodies

Altering one's body-perception through e-textiles and haptic metaphors

Tajadura-Jiménez A, Väljamäe A and Kuusk K (2020) Altering One's Body-Perception Through E-Textiles and Haptic Metaphors. Front. Robot. AI 7:7.Technologies change rapidly our perception of reality, moving from augmented to virtual to magical. While e-textiles are a key component in exergame or space suits, the transformative potential of the internal side of garments to create embodied experiences still remains largely unexplored. This paper is the result from an art-science collaborative project that combines recent neuroscience findings, body-centered design principles and 2D vibrotactile array-based fabrics to alter one's body perception. We describe an iterative design process intertwined with two user studies on the effects on body-perceptions and emotional responses of various vibration patterns within textile that were designed as spatial haptic metaphors. Our results show potential in considering materials (e.g., rocks) as sensations to design for body perceptions (e.g., being heavy, strong) and emotional responses. We discuss these results in terms of sensory effects on body perception and synergetic impact to research on embodiment in virtual environments, human-computer interaction, and e-textile design. The work brings a new perspective to the sensorial design of embodied experiences which is based on "material perception" and haptic metaphors, and highlights potential opportunities opened by haptic clothing to change body-perception.This work was partially supported by PSI2016-79004-R Magic Shoes project grant (AEI/FEDER, UE), from Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain and the Magic Lining VERTIGO project as part of the STARTS program of the European Commission, based on technological elements from the project Magic Shoes. AT-J was supported by RYC- 2014–15421 grant from the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad of Spain and AV was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PUT1518

Altering One's Body-Perception Through E-Textiles and Haptic Metaphors

Technologies change rapidly our perception of reality, moving from augmented to virtual to magical. While e-textiles are a key component in exergame or space suits, the transformative potential of the internal side of garments to create embodied experiences still remains largely unexplored. This paper is the result from an art-science collaborative project that combines recent neuroscience findings, body-centered design principles and 2D vibrotactile array-based fabrics to alter one's body perception. We describe an iterative design process intertwined with two user studies on the effects on body-perceptions and emotional responses of various vibration patterns within textile that were designed as spatial haptic metaphors. Our results show potential in considering materials (e.g., rocks) as sensations to design for body perceptions (e.g., being heavy, strong) and emotional responses. We discuss these results in terms of sensory effects on body perception and synergetic impact to research on embodiment in virtual environments, human-computer interaction, and e-textile design. The work brings a new perspective to the sensorial design of embodied experiences which is based on “material perception” and haptic metaphors, and highlights potential opportunities opened by haptic clothing to change body-perception

Investigating emotionally resonant vibrations as a calming intervention for people with social anxiety

Social anxiety is a prevalent mental health concern and its adverse effects impact quality of life. Exposure Therapy is a key component of prominent psychotherapies for social anxiety, but adherence can be challenging and an intervention improving retention and accessibility would be valuable. Vibrotactile stimulation is a potential intervention for in vivo exposure as it can discreetly augment other objects or wearable devices during a social situation without interrupting conversation. This thesis explored the development of a calming vibrotactile intervention for social anxiety exposure therapy, prioritising the experiences of socially anxious users to inform the design and display of novel stimuli. As vibrotactile stimuli have a narrow affective range, novel emotionally resonant stimuli, which evoke real world sensations to elicit an associated emotional response (e.g. stimuli that evoke cat purring to remind users of past animal touch), were studied as an avenue to deliver calming experiences. Five studies and two surveys were conducted. Results from the first two experiments showed emotional responses to stimuli varied between participants, depending individual associations with real-world phenomena. Along with two surveys, this informed the investigation of the specific requirements and affective haptic preferences of socially anxious users. User suggestions and affective preferences from these surveys informed the testing of a wider selection of emotionally resonant cues in the third experiment, trialed alongside warm and cool thermal cues to observe impact on emotional resonance and response, although the effects were too minor to justify their future use. With a library of emotionally resonant stimuli validated, methods of delivering them to users was explored with participatory prototyping. Participants who reported high levels of social anxiety designed personalised comfort objects, then augmented them with stimuli. These designs informed the design of three prototype objects which were augmented with vibrations in a final between-groups study which assessed if they could reduce anxiety during a social exposure task. Participants in the treatment group held their choice of object and stimulus to during exposure and exhibited significantly more varied anxiety responses to the task than a control group, reporting that their objects were calming and helpful. These findings suggest that emotionally resonant vibrotactile cues can act as a calming intervention, but their efficacy requires personalisation and varies strongly per user. This thesis contributes novel understanding of the specific requirements of socially anxious users when interacting with affective haptics and pioneers a new category of calming vibrotactile stimuli, with demonstrable applicability in socially anxious settings

Design and Evaluation of Biofeedback:Interfaces for Awareness and Regulation of Affect

Biofeedback interfaces enable dynamic representations of bodily data using sensors and actuators to actively control complex physiological activities. These provide individuals with access to their psychophysiological processes, help regulate bodily responses, and have been shown to have positive effects on affective health and wellbeing. Traditionally biofeedback has been provided using audiovisual modality whose understanding usually required technical input from physicians. There are still a limited number of biofeedback interfaces that have been deployed from the lab settings to everyday lives. Specifically, there is a limited focus on low-cost, non-screen based, emerging alternative technologies that could support biosensory information in different ways so that users themselves can understand it. To address these challenges, this thesis engages in the design and evaluation of low-cost, wearable smart materials and actuators to support awareness and regulation of affect. The thesis presents six studies describing them. The first exploration of smart materials and actuators helped in unpacking their material qualities. These include responsiveness, duration, rhythm, aliveness, and range, which led to the design of six wearable visual and haptic interfaces representing physiological arousal. By evaluating the six interfaces in daily life settings, the thesis' findings have shown how the material-driven qualities of the interfaces shape people’s awareness of emotions in different ways starting with reflexivity, emotion identification, and finally, its attribution. This thesis then presents the design of the ThermoPixels toolkit containing digital and physical materials. The toolkit is evaluated by involving users in the design of affective displays for arousal. Findings reveal two distinct motivations for designing physiological arousal interfaces, i.e., awareness and regulation. Analysis of both types of representations helped study their qualities and the role of colors and shapes for personalizing interfaces for awareness and regulation of arousal, i.e., awareness of increased arousal can be supported by angular shapes, warm colors, and rich patterns and regulation of high arousal can be supported by round shapes, cool colors, and light patterns. Moving forward, the thesis engages in the exploration of heart rate variability to regulate affect. It introduces a mixed-methods approach to compare and evaluate wearable heart rate variability sensors in terms of data quality and user acceptance. Following heart rate variability exploration, the thesis involves users in the design of vibrotactile and temperature patterns for affect regulation and demonstrates the value of personalized haptic patterns in regulating affect as measured by self-reported forms and heart rate variability. Interviews with the haptic group help study haptic patterns' experiential qualities and participants' experiences. Between subjects analysis indicates that subjective and objective measures of anxiety and stress decreased under haptic patterns than without and that low frequency vibration was the most effective pattern for stress regulation. The contribution of this work includes unpacking experiential qualities of high - low frequency vibration and warm - cool thermal patterns for affect regulation by engaging users in their design and guidelines for designing these patterns. Finally, two visual and haptic wearable smartwatch apps i.e., Breathe and Heart are designed for affect regulation. These utilize slow bodily rhythms of breathing and heartbeat and are evaluated in daily life under everyday life situations of high arousal negative affect. Findings show the value of technology-delivered interventions in supporting affect regulation that can augment prior strategies being implemented by individuals in their daily lives. The thesis is concluded with a discussion of research contributions and future directions

Quantifying Cognitive Efficiency of Display in Human-Machine Systems

As a side effect of fast growing informational technology, information overload becomes prevalent in the operation of many human-machine systems. Overwhelming information can degrade operational performance because it imposes large mental workload on human operators. One way to address this issue is to improve the cognitive efficiency of display. A cognitively efficient display should be more informative while demanding less mental resources so that an operator can process larger displayed information using their limited working memory and achieve better performance. In order to quantitatively evaluate this display property, a Cognitive Efficiency (CE) metric is formulated as the ratio of the measures of two dimensions: display informativeness and required mental resources (each dimension can be affected by display, human, and contextual factors). The first segment of the dissertation discusses the available measurement techniques to construct the CE metric and initially validates the CE metric with basic discrete displays. The second segment demonstrates that displays showing higher cognitive efficiency improve multitask performance. This part also identifies the version of the CE metric that is the most predictive of multitask performance. The last segment of the dissertation applies the CE metric in driving scenarios to evaluate novel speedometer displays; however, it finds that the most efficient display may not better enhance concurrent tracking performance in driving. Although the findings of dissertation show several limitations, they provide valuable insight into the complicated relationship among display, human cognition, and multitask performance in human-machine systems

Low-Cost Sensors and Biological Signals

Many sensors are currently available at prices lower than USD 100 and cover a wide range of biological signals: motion, muscle activity, heart rate, etc. Such low-cost sensors have metrological features allowing them to be used in everyday life and clinical applications, where gold-standard material is both too expensive and time-consuming to be used. The selected papers present current applications of low-cost sensors in domains such as physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and affective technologies. The results cover various aspects of low-cost sensor technology from hardware design to software optimization