Therapeutic Haptics for Mental Health and Wellbeing

McDaniel, Troy; Panchanathan, Sethuraman

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34230-2_6

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 127 publications

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“…Most of the literature focuses on either evaluating the user experience (UX) of an MST prototype, or the social experience of the person being touched. For example, these studies have shown that touch can increase well-being and bonding [5], [15]- [17]. However, the social experience of the touch initiator is also affected when touching others, as seen in research with co-located physical touching [18]- [21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mediated Social Touching: Haptic Feedback Affects Social Experience of Touch Initiators

Maunsbach,

Hornbæk,

Seifi

2023

2023 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC)

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Mediated social touch enables us to share hugs, handshakes, and caresses at a distance. Past work has focused on the experience of being touched by a remote person, but the touch initiator's experience is underexplored. We ask whether a variation in haptic feedback can influence the touch initiator's social experience of the interaction. In a user study participants stroked a remote person's hand in virtual reality while feeling no haptic feedback, ultrasonic stimulation, or passive feedback from a silicone hand. In each condition, they rated the pleasantness of the interaction, the friendliness of the remote person, and their sense of co-presence. We also captured the velocity of their stroking and asked for reflections on the interaction and mediated social touch as a whole. The results show significant effects of haptic feedback on co-presence, pleasantness, and stroking velocity. The qualitative responses suggest that these results are due to the familiarity of the solid silicone hand, and the participants' assumption that when they felt feedback, the remote person felt similar feedback.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mediated Social Touching: Haptic Feedback Affects Social Experience of Touch Initiators

Maunsbach,

Hornbæk,

Seifi

2023

2023 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC)

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“…The study details are limited, but they found the haptic-only modality to be the most subjectively relaxing and resulted in the largest decrease in stress based on a Stress Arousal Checklist. Further vibrotactile interfaces to encourage mindful breathing are Breathe with the Ocean [ 71 ], a blanket that mimics the tide coming in and out with vibration, and CalmMeNow [ 72 ] which generates vibration on the wrist and sternum through haptic bracelets, as discussed by McDaniel et al [ 73 ]. The Breath Chair developed by Yanaka et al [ 74 ] is a chair with embedded pneumatics in the back that simulate breathing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A calming hug: Design and validation of a tactile aid to ease anxiety

Haynes

Lywood²,

Crowe

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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Anxiety disorders affect approximately one third of people during their lifetimes and are the ninth leading cause of global disability. Current treatments focus on therapy and pharmacological interventions. However, therapy is costly and pharmacological interventions often have undesirable side-effects. Healthy people also regularly suffer periods of anxiety. Therefore, a non-pharmacological, intuitive, home intervention would be complementary to other treatments and beneficial for non-clinical groups. Existing at-home anxiety aids, such as guided meditations, typically employ visual and/or audio stimuli to guide the user into a calmer state. However, the tactile sense has the potential to be a more natural modality to target in an anxiety-calming device. The tactile domain is relatively under-explored, but we suggest that there are manifold physiological and affective qualities of touch that lend it to the task. In this study we demonstrate that haptic technology can offer an enjoyable, effective and widely accessible alternative for easing state anxiety. We describe a novel huggable haptic interface that pneumatically simulates slow breathing. We discuss the development of this interface through a focus group evaluating five prototypes with embedded behaviours (‘breathing’, ‘purring’, ‘heartbeat’ and ‘illumination’). Ratings indicated that the ‘breathing’ prototype was most pleasant to interact with and participants described this prototype as ‘calming’ and ‘soothing’, reminding them of a person breathing. This prototype was developed into an ergonomic huggable cushion containing a pneumatic chamber powered by an external pump allowing the cushion to ‘breathe’. A mixed-design experiment (n = 129) inducing anxiety through a group mathematics test found that the device was effective at reducing pre-test anxiety compared to a control (no intervention) condition and that this reduction in anxiety was indistinguishable from that of a guided meditation. Our findings highlight the efficacy of this interface, demonstrating that haptic technologies can be effective at easing anxiety. We suggest that the field should be explored in more depth to capture the nuances of different modalities in relation to specific situations and trait characteristics.

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“…[3] For example, blind people can use tactile-based braille for cognitive assistance to interact with the environment and improve the quality of life. [4][5][6][7][8][9] Advanced tactile feedback technologies have been utilized in applications such as displays, robotics, and virtual reality systems. [1,[5][6][7][8][9] However, traditional tactile feedback devices based on electromagnetic technologies, [10] shape-memory alloys, [11] or magnetorheological fluids [12] are bulky and inflexible to result in low fidelity in various systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[4][5][6][7][8][9] Advanced tactile feedback technologies have been utilized in applications such as displays, robotics, and virtual reality systems. [1,[5][6][7][8][9] However, traditional tactile feedback devices based on electromagnetic technologies, [10] shape-memory alloys, [11] or magnetorheological fluids [12] are bulky and inflexible to result in low fidelity in various systems. Highly effective and flexible actuators with large force output, small size, and low cost are desirable but there are challenges in constructing these actuators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Programmable Tactile Feedback Patterns for Cognitive Assistance by Flexible Electret Actuators

Jiang

Qiu

et al. 2021

Adv Funct Materials

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Advanced tactile feedback systems are important tools in the field of human-machine interfaces. In this work, an airflow-assisted corona charging process is utilized to charge films made of electret material for the construction of a sandwich-structured flexible actuator system. With a voltage as low as 20 V, this flexible actuator can stimulate skin sensations for basic tactile feedback functions. Under a driving voltage of 200 V, the system can generate an output force of ≈55 mN, which is larger than that of the output force by cellphones under the vibration mode. Utilizing these prototype flexible electret actuators array, programmable patterns of tactile sensations can be generated on human skin according to both vibrational intensities and spatial positions. Thus, two demonstrations of human-machine interface are illustrated based on the proposed device: 1) A tactile-assisted navigation prototype with programmable commands; and 2) a tactile-based braille prototype constructed via a 6-pixels actuator array to generate designated patterns for assisting human-machine communications. As such, this system prototype has potential for applications in cognitive assistance via tactile feedbacks.

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Therapeutic Haptics for Mental Health and Wellbeing

Cited by 9 publications

References 127 publications

Mediated Social Touching: Haptic Feedback Affects Social Experience of Touch Initiators

Mediated Social Touching: Haptic Feedback Affects Social Experience of Touch Initiators

A calming hug: Design and validation of a tactile aid to ease anxiety

Programmable Tactile Feedback Patterns for Cognitive Assistance by Flexible Electret Actuators

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