CHS: Small: Remote Supportive Touch for Health and Wellness

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Supportive touch plays an important role in how people communicate empathy, compassion, and group affiliation in peer-support health and wellness communities (e.g., holding hands at the start of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting). While communication technologies such as Apple's FaceTime have allowed such peer-support meetings to extend their reach through online communities, supportive touch is not currently possible in these online settings. While researchers have explored the possibility of remotely transmitting supportive touch, few ideas have progressed beyond the conceptual design stage, fewer still have been tested through rigorous empirical investigations, and almost none have been deployed in real-world settings. The PI's goal in this project is to move the field forward by developing and evaluating projection-based and haptic remote supportive touch technologies in health and wellness domains. Since the field research will take place at St. Paul facilities for recovery from substance use disorders, the work has the potential for broad impact by helping to address the significant gap between people who need support and those who are able to get it. Additional broader impact will derive from the fact that one of the prototype systems to be developed as part of this project involves extending and transferring research findings to a commercially available system, where they will be made freely available to the general public.Two broad research questions drive the investigation: What variables affect user perceptions of remote supportive touch and how do these variables interact? And how does remote supportive touch affect relationship formation and maintenance in the wild in the health and wellness domain? These questions will be addressed through three synergistic activities: development and validation of a questionnaire (for measuring user perceptions of remote supportive touch, which will provide a baseline for rigorous empirical investigations in this domain); a laboratory investigation (that addresses open questions about the impact of three variables on user perceptions of remote supportive touch: relationship with partner, emotional salience of task, and presence of haptic activation) contributing to a model of user perception of remote supportive touch; and a field deployment of two prototypes in the context of peer-support in the health and wellness context (holding hands with a remote partner to promote recovery from substance use disorders) to validate the model in the wild (one of these prototypes serves to transfer research findings on camera-projector collaboration systems to the HP Sprout commercially available technology, while the other leverages novel shape-shifting display technology to represent a remote hand, thereby also contributing to the emerging domain of shape-shifting interfaces).