May 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 17HAPTICSTouching
Emoji
New tech conveys emotion
through a virtual touchDistancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic
has made both physical and social connec-
tions a touch more difficult to maintain. For
Stanford University graduate student Millie
Salvato, being apart from her girlfriend on
the opposite coast has proved challenging.
Sometimes a text or video call is not
enough, and people in Salvato’s situation
often long for a way to send a loving ca-
ress or comforting squeeze from afar. For
a new study detailed in IEEE Transactions
on Haptics, she and her colleagues demon-
strated a wearable sleeve that can simu-
late human touch—and convey abstract
social messages sent electronically.
“It’s a unique work that looks at how our
social touch is delivered and then... how to
reproduce it,” says Gregory Gerling, a touchresearcher at the Uni-
versity of Virginia
who was not involved
in the study.
Salvato and her
team measured how 37
participants expressed
social information in differ-
ent situations. In each test,
one person wore a pressure-sens-
ing device on an arm, and another touched
it to respond to scenarios involving six in-
tended meanings: attention seeking, grati-
tude, happiness, calming, love and sadness.
After collecting 661 touch movements—
squeezes, strokes, shakes, pokes, and the
like—Salvato and her colleagues mapped
the location and pressure of each. Next, they
used a machine-learning algorithm to select
the movements that were most reliably part
of each response. Finally, they programmed
a wearable sleeve to simulate these move-
ments using eight embedded disks that vi-
brate when electronically signaled.
“It doesn’t feel like an actual human
hand... but it doesn’t feel like these dis-
crete motions either,” Salvato says, as onemight expect from
large moving disks.
“It feels nice, honestly.”
Even with no train-
ing, 30 new study
participants correctly
matched the simulated
touches to the six scenarios
45 percent of the time—about
2.7 times more than by chance. For
comparison, a previous study from Gerling’s
laboratory found participants could match
scenarios for touches from real human
hands 57 percent of the time.
In the new study, “I think it’s interesting
that participants can reliably understand
what touch has been delivered to them at
a pretty high rate, given the sparse amount
of information that they have available to
them,” Gerling says.
Previous research has found that social
touch is important for physical and mental
health. In the future, instead of just send-
ing a <3 to a loved one by phone or com-
puter, adding a “touch emoji” might help
us feel just a little bit closer. — Richard SimaIllustrations by Thomas Fuchs May 2022, Scientifi cAmerican.com 17H A P T I C STouching
Emoji
New tech conveys emotion
through a virtual touchDistancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic
has made both physical and social connec-
tions a touch more diffi cult to maintain. For
Stanford University graduate student Millie
Salvato, being apart from her girlfriend on
the opposite coast has proved challenging.
Sometimes a text or video call is not
enough, and people in Salvato’s situation
often long for a way to send a loving ca-
ress or comforting squeeze from afar. For
a new study detailed in IEEE Transactions
on Haptics, she and her colleagues demon-
strated a wearable sleeve that can simu-
late human touch—and convey abstract
social messages sent electronically.
“It’s a unique work that looks at how our
social touch is delivered and then... how to
reproduce it,” says Gregory Gerling, a touchresearcher at the Uni-
versity of Virginia
who was not involved
in the study.
Salvato and her
team measured how 37
participants expressed
social information in diff er-
ent situations. In each test,
one person wore a pressure-sens-
ing device on an arm, and another touched
it to respond to scenarios involving six in-
tended meanings: attention seeking, grati-
tude, happiness, calming, love and sadness.
After collecting 661 touch movements—
squeezes, strokes, shakes, pokes, and the
like—Salvato and her colleagues mapped
the location and pressure of each. Next, they
used a machine-learning algorithm to select
the movements that were most reliably part
of each response. Finally, they programmed
a wearable sleeve to simulate these move-
ments using eight embedded disks that vi-
brate when electronically signaled.
“It doesn’t feel like an actual human
hand... but it doesn’t feel like these dis-
crete motions either,” Salvato says, as onemight expect from
large moving disks.
“It feels nice, honestly.”
Even with no train-
ing, 30 new study
participants correctly
matched the simulated
touches to the six scenarios
45 percent of the time—about
2.7 times more than by chance. For
comparison, a previous study from Gerling’s
laboratory found participants could match
scenarios for touches from real human
hands 57 percent of the time.
In the new study, “I think it’s interesting
that participants can reliably understand
what touch has been delivered to them at
a pretty high rate, given the sparse amount
of information that they have available to
them,” Gerling says.
Previous research has found that social
touch is important for physical and mental
health. In the future, instead of just send-
ing a <3 to a loved one by phone or com-
puter, adding a “touch emoji” might help
us feel just a little bit closer. — Richard SimaIllustrations by Thomas Fuchssad0522Adva3p.indd 17sad0522Adva3p.indd 17 3/23/22 5:26 PM3/23/22 5:26 PM
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