CHS: Small: Remote Supportive Touch for Health and Wellness

在同伴支持的健康和保健社区中，支持性接触在人们如何交流同情、同情和团体关系方面起着重要作用（例如，在匿名戒酒会开始时牵手）。虽然像苹果的FaceTime这样的通信技术已经允许这种同伴支持会议通过在线社区扩展到他们的范围，但在这些在线环境中，支持性接触目前是不可能的。虽然研究人员已经探索了远程传递支持性触摸的可能性，但很少有想法超越了概念设计阶段，更少的想法通过严格的实证调查进行了测试，而且几乎没有在现实环境中部署。PI在这个项目中的目标是通过开发和评估基于投影和触觉的远程支持触摸技术，在健康和保健领域推动该领域的发展。由于实地研究将在圣保罗的药物使用障碍康复设施进行，因此这项工作有可能产生广泛的影响，因为它有助于解决需要支持的人与能够获得支持的人之间的巨大差距。作为该项目的一部分将要开发的一个原型系统涉及到将研究成果扩展和转移到一个商业上可用的系统，在那里它们将免费向公众提供，这一事实将产生更广泛的影响。两个广泛的研究问题推动了调查：什么变量影响用户对远程支持性触摸的感知，这些变量如何相互作用？远程的支持性接触是如何在健康领域影响野外关系的形成和维持的？这些问题将通过三个协同活动来解决：开发和验证问卷（用于测量用户对远程支持性触摸的感知，这将为这一领域的严格实证调查提供基线）；一项实验室调查（解决了三个变量对用户远程支持性触摸感知的影响的开放问题：与伴侣的关系，任务的情感显著性和触觉激活的存在）有助于建立用户远程支持性触摸感知模型；以及在健康和保健环境中的同伴支持背景下的两个原型的现场部署（与远程合作伙伴牵手以促进物质使用障碍的恢复），以在野外验证模型（其中一个原型用于将相机-投影仪协作系统的研究成果转移到HP Sprout商用技术上，而另一个利用新颖的变形显示技术来代表远程的手）。因此也有助于形状转换界面的新兴领域)。

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).