Exploring Awareness of Breathing through Deep Touch Pressure

Abstract

Deep Pressure Therapy relies on exerting frm touch to help individuals with sensory sensitivity. We performed frst-person explorations of deep pressure enabled by shape-changing actuation driven by breathing sensing. This revealed a novel design space with rich, evocative, aesthetically interesting interactions that can help increase breathing awareness and appreciation through: (1) applying symmetrical as well as asymmetrical pressure on the torso;(2) using pressure to direct attention to muscles or bone structure involved in diferent breathing patterns; (3) apply synchronous as well as asynchronous feedback following or opposing the user's breathing rhythm through applying rhythmic pressure. Taken together these explorations led us to design (4) breathing correspondence interactions -a balance point right between leading and following users' breathing patterns by frst applying deep pressure -almost to the point of being unpleasant -and then releasing in rhythmic fow.

Characterizing affiliative touch in humans and its role in advancing haptic design

“…Haptic technology used to facilitate self-regulation is often designed to influence biological processes that are, at least indirectly, subject to voluntary influences on such physiological processes as heart rate and breathing. [96][97][98] However, other technologies have been successfully used to target visceral, nonconscious control loops. Notably, Calmer is a robotic device that is placed in an incubator to directly simulate multiple components of touch that have been found to reduce pain in preterm infants during medical procedures.…”

“…Haptic technology used to facilitate self‐regulation is often designed to influence biological processes that are, at least indirectly, subject to voluntary influences on such physiological processes as heart rate and breathing 96–98 . However, other technologies have been successfully used to target visceral, nonconscious control loops.…”

Tangible Interaction for Supporting Well-being

“…Conversely, there has been a growth in research activity investigating the potential of tangible interaction for supporting well-being. Examples include material exploration with shape-changing, haptics and e-textiles technologies to support bodily awareness [1,14,18], wearable artifacts for remote engagement [4], mindfulness [9,10], and affect regulation [19,20]. Practitioners who are exploring embodied interaction and somaesthetic design have argued for the importance of contact and sensory interaction for well-being [2,7,12].…”

Touching Our Breathing through Shape-Change: Monster, Organic Other, or Twisted Mirror

“…There is already plenty of design work on breathing interactions reported in HCI, such as [9,12,14,69,74,99]. Most of it focuses on sensing breathing and then visualising or showing various measurements of it [13,32,60,83,89], or attempts to use shape-change to provide breathing feedback on the torso [15,49,94]. What we came to uncover through our felt soma design process was a whole range of digital touch experiences that did not mirror human-human touch nor human-object touch.…”