Ali Israr

Carine Rognon, Taylor Bunge, Meiyuzi Gao et al.

Social touch is essential for our social interactions, communication, and well-being. It has been shown to reduce anxiety and loneliness; and is a key channel to transmit emotions for which words are not sufficient, such as love, sympathy, reassurance, etc. However, direct physical contact is not always possible due to being remotely located, interacting in a virtual environment, or as a result of a health issue. Mediated social touch enables physical interactions, despite the distance, by transmitting the haptic cues that constitute social touch through devices. As this technology is fairly new, the users' needs and their expectations on a device design and its features are unclear, as well as who would use this technology, and in which conditions. To better understand these aspects of the mediated interaction, we conducted an online survey on 258 respondents located in the USA. Results give insights on the type of interactions and device features that the US population would like to use.

M. Salvato, Sophia R. Williams, Cara M. Nunez et al.

During social interactions, people use auditory, visual, and haptic cues to convey their thoughts, emotions, and intentions. Due to weight, energy, and other hardware constraints, it is difficult to create devices that completely capture the complexity of human touch. Here we explore whether a sparse representation of human touch is sufficient to convey social touch signals. To test this we collected a dataset of social touch interactions using a soft wearable pressure sensor array, developed an algorithm to map recorded data to an array of actuators, then applied our algorithm to create signals that drive an array of normal indentation actuators placed on the arm. Using this wearable, low-resolution, low-force device, we find that users are able to distinguish the intended social meaning, and compare performance to results based on direct human touch. As online communication becomes more prevalent, such systems to convey haptic signals could allow for improved distant socializing and empathetic remote human-human interaction.

Osama R. Bilal, Vincenzo Costanza, Ali Israr et al.

Haptic feedback is the most significant sensory interface following visual cues. Developing thin, flexible surfaces that function as haptic interfaces is important for augmenting virtual reality, wearable devices, robotics and prostheses. For example, adding a haptic feedback interface to prosthesis could improve their acceptance among amputees. State of the art programmable interfaces targeting the skin feel-of-touch through mechano-receptors are limited by inadequate sensory feedback, cumbersome mechanisms or narrow frequency of operation. Here, we present a flexible metasurface as a generic haptic interface capable of producing complex tactile patterns on the human skin at wide range of frequencies. The metasurface is composed of multiple "pixels" that can locally amplify both input displacements and forces. Each of these pixels encodes various deformation patterns capable of producing different sensations on contact. The metasurface can transform a harmonic signal containing multiple frequencies into a complex preprogrammed tactile pattern. Our findings, corroborated by user studies conducted on human candidates, can open new avenues for wearable and robotic interfaces.