Touch Over A Distance: A Review of Affective Haptic Interface
We present a review of literature regarding the digital mediation of social touch. We first
explore the nature of touch as a physiological phenomenon, involving cutaneous and
kinesthetic components. We proceed to examine the literature of the psycho-social
aspects of touch. These literature generally agree that touch has meaning only within
context. With context, touch is a direct medium for expressing intimacy and affection.
Because of the importance of touch in interpersonal intimacy, researchers have proposed
many haptic interfaces to mediate social touch. We reviewed a set of applications that
have shown that mediated social touch has potentials in supporting interpersonal intimacy,
enhancing a feeling of connectedness between individuals. Most applications, however
serve to communicate simple ideas using symbolic haptic icons. A deficiency is that most
affective haptic applications simply assume these benefits with little carefully designed
empirical study. Based on physiological and social psychological literature on touch, we
assess the current research and design efforts and propose future directions for the field of
affective haptic interfaces. We propose that contextualizing touch with other interaction
modalities, like voice and video, will help people to express affection more direct and
accurate.
1. Introduction
1. Touch plays a very important role in the development of human perception and
cognition. Besides, touch is particularly significant in social interactions.
2. However, the research of mediating touch in HCI is far from sufficient. Though
there exists a set of empirical applications and design already[1-4], most of the
applications and designs are lack theoretic support [5, 6]. Many fundamental
questions are still under exploration. It is due to the complex of touch [7-9].
3. In order to understand the meaning of touch in interpersonal communication and
address affective haptic interfaces as a design problem, it is important for us to
have a profound understanding of nature of touch as a physiological phenomenon
as well as its psycho-social aspects. Paper Layout.
2. Understanding Touch
2.1 Touch as a physiological phenomenon
1. The modality of touch includes distinct cutaneous, kinesthetic and haptic systems
that are distinguished on the basis of the underlying neural inputs [9]. The
cutaneous receptors are embedded in the skin; the kinesthetic receptors lie in
muscles, tendons, and joints; and the hpatic system uses combined inputs form
both. In functional terms, the cutaneous sense provides an observer with
information ab out stimulation of the skin surface; and kinesthesis provides static
and dynamic information about the relative positioning of the head, torso, limbs
and effectors used in touching [7]. The haptic system uses combined inputs from
both the cutaneous and kinesthetic systems.
2. Another widely discussed distinction is between active and passive modes of
touch in J.J. Gibson’s work[7, 10, 11]. Active touch is sensed by the person who
initiates the touch, whereas passive touch is sensed by the person being touched.
The difference between is the presence or absence of motor of control. It has been
stated in Cullen’s work [12] that the reason of distinguishing these two modes is
that human processes them differently in order to precisely guide motor control
and achieve perceptual stability.
3. Loomis and Lederman proposed a taxonomy of touch which requires three
important factors. They are (1) the type of information available to the observer,
(2) the degree of control exerted by the observer in picking up stimulus
information, and (3) the transparency of the linkage between efference and
reafference. Loomis and Lederman combined Gibson’s criterion—active or
passive mode of touch with the classification of sensory systems (cutaneous,
kinesthetic and haptic system) [7] and yielded five “modes of touch”: cutaneous
perception, passive kinesthetic perception, passive haptic perception, active
kinesthetic perception, and active haptic perception.
They summarized many of the studies that had investigated performance in active
and passive conditions. Their summary indicates whether cutaneous information
was used in the performance of task, if so the body locus and tactile mode of
stimulation, whether kinesthetic information was available, if so, which body part
was moved and whether the observer had control over sensing. The experiments
on estimation and discrimination of roughness clearly show that roughness
perception depends only upon cutaneous information. Similarly, the experiments
on Braille reading indicate that active control and kinesthetic information are
quite unimportant for the sensing characters.
In most of the 2-dimensional pattern recognition studies, active touch has resulted
in superior performance than passive touch, but in all such studies the passive
touch condition involved only cutaneous stimulation. Thus one doesn’t know
whether the superiority of active touch resulted from the control over sensing or
the availability of kinesthetic information. Only in studies by Magee and Kennedy
and by Bairstow and Laszlo was he comparison between active and passive
conditions, in both of which afferent kinesthesis was available. Based on evidence
so far, there seems to be no advantage in permitting the observer to control the
pickup of the information.
2.2
Touch as a Psychological and Social phenomenon
1. Touch is important to the development of human [13, 14]
1.1 Touch is important in early childhood development.
1.2 Human need to touch or be touched throughout their adult years.
1.3 Some Systematic studies showed that being touched are beneficial for those
who are ill.
1.4 Touching is also related to social and psychological adjustment among normal,
healthy adults.
2. Touch Categories by Heslin 1974 [15]
2.1 Functional/professional
2.2 Social/polite
2.3 Friendship/warmth
2.4 Love/intimacy
2.5 Sexual/arousal
3. Meanings of touch [13] (haptics, wikipedia)
Touch research conducted by Jones and Yarbrough (1985) revealed 18 different
meanings of touch, grouped in seven types: Positive affect (emotion), playfulness,
control, ritual, hybrid (mixed), task-related, and accidental touch.
4. Touch and context [13]
Contextual factors are critical to the meanings of touch. The same behavior may
have different meanings, depending on the context and different behaviors might
have the same or similar meanings. The role of context in shaping meanings of
touch has been ignored in the past research. In these researches, they conclude
that ”specific touch gestures do not have universal meanings”. However, the
meaning of touch could be uncovered if the context of each touch, including
accompanying verbal statements and other elements of the social situation were
examined.
2.3 Touch as a nonverbal communication modality
1. Touch, as a nonverbal behavior, has been studied using a nonverbal
communication framework. Senders encode his information into the nonverbal
behavior behavior while receivers decode the information
2. Research on the relationship between nonDifferent research efforts in defining
“communication” [16, 17]
3. Mediated Touch Applications
Examine the existing applications with focus on what kind of touch meaning is intended
to be provided, how and the evaluation.
Important: compare the existing applications with the research in psychology and
communication.
4. Mediated Touch As A Design Problem
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