TY - JOUR
T1 - User Expectations and Mental Models for Communicating Emotions through Compressive & Warm Affective Garment Actuation
AU - Foo, Esther W.
AU - Dunne, Lucy E.
AU - Holschuh, Brad
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/3/29
Y1 - 2021/3/29
N2 - Wearable haptic garments for communicating emotions have great potential in various applications, including supporting social interactions, improving immersive experiences in entertainment, or simply as a research tool. Shape-memory alloys (SMAs) are an emerging and interesting actuation scheme for affective haptic garments since they provide coupled warmth and compressive sensations in a single actuation-potentially acting as a proxy for human touch. However, SMAs are underutilized in current research and there are many unknowns regarding their design/use. The goal of this work is to map the design space for SMA-based garment-mediated emotional communication through warm, compressive actuation (termed 'warm touch'). Two online surveys were deployed to gather user expectations in using varying 'warm touch' parameters (body location, intensity, pattern) to communicate 7 distinct emotions. Further, we also investigated mental models used by participants during the haptic strategy selection process. The findings show 5 major categories of mental models, including representation of body sensations, replication of typical social touch strategies, metaphorical representation of emotions, symbolic representation of physical actions, and mimicry of objects or tasks; the frequency of use of each of these mental frameworks in relation to the selected 'warm touch' parameters in the communication of emotions are presented. These gathered insights can inform more intuitive and consistent haptic garment design approaches for emotional communication.
AB - Wearable haptic garments for communicating emotions have great potential in various applications, including supporting social interactions, improving immersive experiences in entertainment, or simply as a research tool. Shape-memory alloys (SMAs) are an emerging and interesting actuation scheme for affective haptic garments since they provide coupled warmth and compressive sensations in a single actuation-potentially acting as a proxy for human touch. However, SMAs are underutilized in current research and there are many unknowns regarding their design/use. The goal of this work is to map the design space for SMA-based garment-mediated emotional communication through warm, compressive actuation (termed 'warm touch'). Two online surveys were deployed to gather user expectations in using varying 'warm touch' parameters (body location, intensity, pattern) to communicate 7 distinct emotions. Further, we also investigated mental models used by participants during the haptic strategy selection process. The findings show 5 major categories of mental models, including representation of body sensations, replication of typical social touch strategies, metaphorical representation of emotions, symbolic representation of physical actions, and mimicry of objects or tasks; the frequency of use of each of these mental frameworks in relation to the selected 'warm touch' parameters in the communication of emotions are presented. These gathered insights can inform more intuitive and consistent haptic garment design approaches for emotional communication.
KW - Affective Haptics
KW - Compression Feedback
KW - Emotion Communication
KW - Emotion Elicitation
KW - Haptic Garments
KW - Mediated Social Touch
KW - Shape Memory Alloys
KW - Wearable Technology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103622737&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85103622737&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3448097
DO - 10.1145/3448097
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103622737
SN - 2474-9567
VL - 5
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
IS - 1
M1 - 3448097
ER -