Research

Touch plays an important social role in fostering and maintaining emotional communication in vital human relationships, but when close relations live apart for extended periods of time, this nonverbal channel is lost. We explore how a custom-built, low degree-of-freedom, wearable haptic display may mediate the encoding and decoding of a set of complex socio-emotional messages that is sent and received by strangers, intimate partners, and even the same individual a week later.