Exploring Personalized Vibrotactile and Thermal Patterns for Affect Regulation

Abstract

The growing HCI interest in wellbeing has led to the emerging area of haptics for affect regulation. In such technologies, distinct haptic patterns are usually designed by researchers; however, current work provides a limited reflection on the rationale for the implemented patterns or the choice of haptic modality. We also know little about how people may benefit from engagement in designing such patterns and what design principles underpin them. We explored vibrotactile and thermal modalities to address these gaps and report on a study with 23 participants. These created haptic patterns for affect regulation during stress elicitation. Findings indicate that subjective and objective measures of anxiety and stress were lower in participants who received haptic patterns than those who did not, and highlighted key experiential qualities of vibrotactile and thermal patterns, and their potential for affect regulation. These open up new design opportunities for affect regulation technologies, including supporting implicit affect regulation through entrainment of slow bodily rhythms, decoupling it from predominant vibrotactile modality, designing thermal biofeedback patterns, and supporting personalized and adaptive patterns.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → User studies; Haptic devices.

Feeling the Temperature of the Room: Unobtrusive Thermal Display of Engagement during Group Communication

“…HCI researchers (e.g., [78,85,86]) have used temperature as a signal to understand elicited emotions and communicate information. There are several studies by Wilson et al [85,86] exploring the relationship between temperature and elicited emotions.…”

“…They found a distribution of arousal and valence values assigned to various temperature inputs [86] and reported that most participants related warmth to presence and high quality of content while cold meant absence and poor quality of content [85]. A recent study by Umair and colleagues [78] asked participants to choose a thermal signal to receive when they were stressed, and half the participants chose cold while the other half chose warm. Umair recommends that individual personalization is crucial to making temperature signals understandable.…”

Design and Evaluation of a Clippable and Personalizable Pneumatic-haptic Feedback Device for Breathing Guidance

“…Affective Sleeve [57] is a sleeve that provides heat and tension created by shape-memory alloy to forearm. Umair et al [75] explored the personalized vibrotactile and thermal patterns for affect regulation, which provides an option of utilizing the vibrotactile pattern to be personalized to regulate not only the heart rate but also the breathing rate. Their work focused on evaluating the effect of personalized intervention patterns, frequency, and intensity for affect regulation using commercial products rather than exploring a new haptic technology.…”

Tangible Interaction for Supporting Well-being

“…Conversely, there has been a growth in research activity investigating the potential of tangible interaction for supporting well-being. Examples include material exploration with shape-changing, haptics and e-textiles technologies to support bodily awareness [1,14,18], wearable artifacts for remote engagement [4], mindfulness [9,10], and affect regulation [19,20]. Practitioners who are exploring embodied interaction and somaesthetic design have argued for the importance of contact and sensory interaction for well-being [2,7,12].…”