A Vibrothermal Haptic Display for Socio-emotional Communication

Touch plays a vital role in maintaining human relationships through social and emotional communication. The proposed haptic display prototype generates stimuli in vibrotactile and thermal modalities toward simulating social touch cues between remote users. High-dimensional spatiotemporal vibrotactile-thermal (vibrothermal) patterns were evaluated with ten participants. The device can be wirelessly operated to enable remote communication. In the future, such patterns can be used to richly simulate social touch cues. A research study was conducted in two parts: first, the identification accuracy of vibrothermal patterns was explored; and second, the relatability of vibrothermal patterns to social touch experienced during social interactions was evaluated. Results revealed that while complex patterns were difficult to identify, simpler patterns, such as SINGLE TAP and HOLD, were highly identifiable and highly relatable to social touch cues. Directional patterns were less identifiable and less relatable to the social touch cues experienced during social interaction.