New tactile device transmits emotions from human touch with nearly 80% accuracy
With the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant, not everyone can or wants to travel during the winter holidays. But what if a virtual touch could give you the confidence that you are not alone?
At the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, computer scientist and roboticist Heather Culbertson is studying various methods of simulating touch. As part of a new project, Culbertson, the senior author of this study together with scientists from Stanford, wanted to find out whether two companions (platonic or romantic) can communicate and express care and emotions remotely.
People perceive a partner's true intentions through personal touch about 57% of the time. When interacting with a device that imitates human touch, respondents were able to distinguish the intent of the touch 45% of the time. Thus, the devices in this study appear to work with about 79% of the accuracy of perceived human touch.
"Our sense of touch is unique. In fact, people have a 'language of touch'," said Culbertson, WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at USC. Creating a virtual touch that people can direct to their loved ones is, in her words, a fairly complex process: we not only differ in comfort levels during communication and in how easily we feel hurt, but different people may also have a particular way of conveying various emotions, such as affection, love, or sadness.
The researchers faced the task of creating an algorithm flexible enough to incorporate many aspects of touch. Their study, published in preprint form in IEEE Transactions on Haptics, was carried out in two stages.
First, a new dataset of social touch interactions was created by recording the location and force of touches when participants conveyed various emotions to their partners through touch. After creating this dataset, the researchers classified these gestures as expressions of attention, gratitude, happiness, soothing, sadness, or love to build a library of pre-recorded signals.
These signals were then translated into tactile pixels (taxels), which could convey emotions to a second group of participants through a wearable tactile band incorporating coil actuators with eight touch points.
A total of 661 touch gestures were recorded. About 45% of the time, people wearing the band were able to understand the intended emotions conveyed through remote touch (compared with 57% for in-person touch). The study demonstrates that the social meaning and expression conveyed through personal communication can be transmitted remotely as well.
"During social interactions, people use auditory, visual and tactile signals to convey their thoughts, emotions and intentions. Due to weight, energy and other hardware constraints, it is difficult to build devices that fully reflect the complexity of human touch. Here we explore whether a sparse representation of human touch is sufficient to transmit social touch signals," the study says.
The researchers' next step will be tuning the algorithms to create a more nuanced sense of virtual touch and improve accuracy.
“Although the physical separation caused by the coronavirus pandemic is decreasing, our families and friends remain scattered across the country and the world as our communities become increasingly global. Such tools would allow people to reach out and touch their loved ones regardless of physical distance, reducing isolation and bringing us closer”
"Using this low-resolution, low-effort wearable device, we found that users can distinguish the intended social meaning and compare performance with results based on direct human touch. As online communication becomes more common, such haptic feedback systems could help improve remote communication and attentive remote interaction between two people," the researchers said.
The Haptic Robotics and Virtual Interaction (HaRVI) Lab explores how people interact with our world, robots and technology through touch. The goal of the research is to create natural and intuitive interactions that realistically mimic the sensations of touch experienced when interacting with the physical world.
Researchers are developing new haptic hardware and rendering algorithms to improve usability, human social connection, the ability to perform certain tasks, and immersion in virtual reality. The research focuses on integrating human perception at every stage of the design process.
