Foundations and Applications of Affective Touch

人类和动物轻松灵活地交流，完成任务，分享情感，寻找安慰。计算系统则不然，生产力、错误和压力障碍的成本是巨大的，并且随着对连接的、始终在线的技术的依赖而增长。对人类情感参数具有敏感性的机器有可能减轻这种负担。触摸，近端和社会负载，在这方面是强大的，触发强烈的反应，在直接的物理人-人或动物的互动，和微妙的影响附带使用手动控制。然而，很少有设计为导向的研究，其情感的影响。基于触摸的情感交流对发育和健康至关重要;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研究触摸本身：真实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，以实现焦虑自我调节和缓解慢性疼痛等目的。在市场上，行业驱动的“触摸需求”量表承认触摸在消费者决策中的作用，以及个体差异。触摸产品要求溢价。然而，由于缺乏设计或原型设计工具，这意味着触摸体验的设计在完成时是临时性的。这个多学科研究的高层次目标是（a）在社会机器人环境中扩展情感触摸通信（基于机器人通过触摸手势感知情感的能力），开发治疗方案，并在多种情况下建立其治疗实践;以及（B）开发，颁布和支持与工具行业相关的触摸设计美学和保存注意力负荷。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培训提供了出色的机会。

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.