Experiments in Mediated Social Touch

Touch is one of the most fundamental and intimate means of interaction between people. From the caring touch between parents and their newborn infant, to the immediacy and expressiveness of touch in interpersonal communication between adults, touch plays an important role in establishing social bonds, communicating emotions , and creating (sexual) arousal. People use touch when providing encouragements or emotional support, or when expressing intimacy or tenderness. By contrast, touch can also be a powerful means to gain compliance, or to persuade someone.

Despite the importance of touch, current interpersonal communication technologies do not yet incorporate touch as a standard option. While several design explorations have addressed some of the technological challenges of incorporating touch into communication devices, the effects on their users’ social perceptions and emotions have not been systematically addressed. In this presentation, I will focus on our empirical work in the area of mediated social touch, including experiments on gender effects (i.e., same-sex versus different-sex touch) and persuasion (i.e., the Midas Touch).    

Emotions Sensing & Interpretation in Everyday Life

Affecting computing heralds the advent of empathic products: products that know how you feel and adapt to it.  Important part of these products is a component that measures en interprets these emotions. From a long history of laboratory research in psychophysiology we expect physiological signals to be likely candidates.This presentation will reflect on the question whether they can measure emotions in real life as well: Can they be measured unobtrusively? Do they reflect emotions for all individuals in the same way? We’ll conclude with some emphatic product concepts that deploy these measurement in real life.

The talk will make the case for systems that are purposefully designed to provide awareness of one's friends, family or more generally one's social network. It will present experiences from the design and evaluation of a collection of such systems developed at the TU/e and Philips Research. Reflecting on these works, I will outline the design space of such systems and I will reflect on the changing ambitions and goals for this line of research, milestones achieved and plans for the future.