Foundations and Applications of Affective Touch

人类和动物以轻松和灵活的方式交流，完成任务，分享情感，找到安慰。计算系统不会这样做，生产力、错误和压力失调的成本是巨大的，而且随着对连接的、始终在线的技术的依赖而不断增长。被赋予对人类情绪参数敏感的机器有可能减轻这一负担。在这方面，近端的和社交负载的触摸是强大的，在人与人或动物的直接物理交互中触发强烈的反应，以及使用手动控制附带的微妙效果。然而，很少有以设计为导向的研究它的情感影响。基于触摸的情感交流对发展和健康至关重要；人-动物疗法是一种有价值的工具，尽管价格昂贵。然而，这些观察并没有系统地检查触摸本身：真正的情感触摸很难控制，因此很难研究。需要一个可控的实验平台来确定这些交易的关键要素，它们是如何工作的，以及它们是否可以被重新创建或支持用于焦虑自我调节和慢性疼痛缓解等目的。在市场上，行业驱动的“触摸需求”量表承认了触摸在消费者决策中的作用，以及个体差异。触觉产品要求溢价。然而，缺乏启发式或原型工具意味着，亲触性体验的设计在完成时根本是临时的。这项多学科研究的高层次目标是：(A)在社交机器人环境中扩展情感触摸交流(基于机器人通过触摸手势感知情感的能力)，开发治疗方案，并在多个环境中建立其治疗实践；以及(B)开发、发布和支持与行业相关的触摸设计启发式美学和保存注意力负荷的工具。这项研究已经涉及多个行业合作伙伴，具有巨大的、已经证明的临床或商业潜力，并为HQP培训提供了绝佳的机会。

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.