Vibrotactile sleeves and multimodal armbands show promise as devices that can transmit information to a user through the tactile sense. In this way, individuals have the potential to receive information haptically when typical auditory or visual channels are preoccupied or unavailable. To achieve this, individuals must successfully learn the mapping between haptic cues and informational icons through cross-modal associative learning. The success of this process is limited by perceptual capabilities of users, as well as lack of neural markers to quantify the success of haptic learning.
Our sense of touch offers a useful mode of communication through haptics that can augment the often-crowded visual and auditory pathways, but haptic devices have yet to be fully integrated into garments and other soft wearables in a way that maintains the compliance and comfort of everyday clothing, resulting in a barrier to widespread adoption.
Affective haptics is an emerging field that is dedicated to the creation, analysis, and evolution of systems for capturing, conveying, and processing emotions through tactile sensation.
Within the lab, we are focused on the application of emotionally evocative vibrotactile cues in emotion regulation. We are using these vibrotactile cues to understand the ways in which emotional response is similar or different for users from different populations.
There has been growing interest in using haptic devices to enhance virtual experiences or to increase the amount of information transferred to a user by wearable devices. As such, the haptics community has proposed a wide range of wearable haptic devices, often featuring multi-sensory cues that convey vibration, squeeze, twist, or skin stretch.