Foundations and Applications of Affective Touch

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Humans and animals communicate with ease and flexibility, to get things done, share emotions and find comfort. Computational systems do not, and the cost in productivity, errors, and stress disorders is immense and growing in step with dependence on connected, always-on technology. Machines endowed with sensitivity to human emotional parameters have the potential to lower this burden. Touch, proximal and socially loaded, is powerful in this respect, triggering strong responses in direct physical human-human or -animal interaction, and subtle effects incidental to using manual controls. However, there has been little design-oriented study of its affective influence. Touch-based emotional communication is crucial to development and health; human-animal therapy is a valuable, albeit expensive, tool. However, these observations have not systematically examined the touch itself: authentic emotional touching is hard to control and therefore study. A controllable experimental platform is required to identify crucial elements of these transactions, how they work, and whether they can be recreated or supported for purposes such as anxiety self-regulation and chronic pain mitigation. In the marketplace, industry-driven 'Need for Touch' scales acknowledge the role of touch in consumer decision making, and of individual differences. Touchophilic products command premium prices. Yet, the lack of heuristics or prototyping tools mean design of touchophilic experiences is ad hoc when done at all. The high-level objectives of this multidisciplinary research are to (a) extend emotional touch communication in a social robot context (based on a robot's ability to sense emotion via touch gesture), develop therapeutic protocols, and establish its therapeutic practice in multiple contexts; and (b) to develop, promulgate and support with tools industry-relevant touch design heuristics for aesthetics and conserving attentional load. This research already involves multiple industry partners and has substantial, already-demonstrated clinical or commercial potential, and provides outstanding opportunities for HQP training.