Hugginess

ISWC '14 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 13 - 17, 2014, SEATTLE, WA, USA Hugginess: Encouraging Interpersonal Touch through Smart Clothes Leonardo Angelini Omar Abou Khaled Abstract University of Applied Sciences University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland and Arts Western Switzerland Fribourg, Switzerland Fribourg, Switzerland [email protected] [email protected] Maurizio Caon Elena Mugellini University of Applied Sciences University of Applied Sciences Physical contact has an important role in human wellbeing. In this paper, we present Hugginess, a concept of interactive system that encourages people to hug by augmenting this gesture with digital information exchange. As a proof of concept, we developed two tshirts that reciprocally send information to the hugged person through the conductive fabric. and Arts Western Switzerland and Arts Western Switzerland Fribourg, Switzerland Fribourg, Switzerland Author Keywords [email protected] [email protected] Hug; interpersonal touch; smart clothes; Denis Lalanne ACM Classification Keywords University of Fribourg H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Fribourg, Switzerland [email protected] Introduction Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. ISWC'14 Adjunct, September 13 - 17, 2014, Seattle, WA, USA Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3048-0/14/09…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2641248.2641356 155 Touch is the first human sense to develop and represents the most fundamental means of contact with the external world [1] [2]. Indeed, touch plays a very important role in human development: early tactile experiences might strongly contribute to shaping and characterizing the emotional, relational, cognitive and neural functioning of the adult [3]. In particular, many studies showed that interpersonal touch can have several positive effects on human behavior and well-being [3]. For instance, touch is so ISWC '14 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 13 - 17, 2014, SEATTLE, WA, USA important in romantic relationships that Montagu stated that touch and love are indivisible [4]. Several studies showed that affective touch between partners can reduce the stress [5] [6]. Touch has been demonstrated being also capable of mediating the release of oxytocin, which is the hormone that helps couples to form lasting relationship bonds [3]. In particular, a study showed that partners who exchanged many hugs in the past have higher levels of oxytocin and significantly lower blood pressure than those who reported of not having been hugged many times [7]. Moreover, Field summed up empirical research on touch including hugging and analyzed the consequences of too little touch for socio-emotional and physical well-being in childhood and adulthood [8]. Interpersonal touch plays a crucial role also in interpersonal communication: the sense of touch provides a very powerful means of eliciting and modulating human emotions. In fact, our skin contains receptors that can elicit affective responses [9]. Therefore, touch can be successfully used to share emotional aspects of communication between people. Since hugging is able to elicit positive emotions, it could be used as a therapy [10] [11]. Using hugging as a means to give rise to such positive emotions can be seen in the frame of positive psychology. With Hugginess, we want to use technology to encourage people to hug in order to improve their general wellbeing. In fact, the effects of hugging can be beneficial to both individuals and society; therefore, as stated by Forsell and Astrom, “encouragement might become a vital part of public wellness programs” [12]. 156 Compared to handshaking, which is another touch gesture commonly used for greeting, hugging is a closer and more affectionate form of hailing. Other studies suggest that hugging behavior seems to create a more emotional quality in the initial phase of a conversation, as compared to a verbal greeting or a handshaking, which leads to a more formal initial phase and conversation [12]. The change from handshaking to hugging during an encounter is associated with a greater emotional involvement [12]. Some people, who have extraverted personality, are naturally facilitated in taking the initiative in hugging, as extraversion is associated with spontaneity and sociability [13]. On the other hand, anxious people, who lack self-esteem and selfconfidence, may present a decreased likelihood of taking the initiative to hug [13]; in this case, an external factor that encourages this behavior can be decisive. Moreover, the current trend of the technologydriven evolution of the human communication is separating people one from each other. In fact, Turkle stated that nowadays people prefer to use computer mediated-communication in order to hide from each other but remaining constantly connected [14]. This change deprives the human communication of the interpersonal touch and many people in society today may already be suffering from a shortage of tactile stimulation, a phenomenon that Field calls “touch hunger” [3]. In this project, we strive to encourage hugging through an innovative system that augments the physical gesture with digital information exchange. Reintroducing the hugging behavior in the interpersonal communication can provide many positive effects on WORKSHOP: ASGA human well-being such as reducing stress and strengthening human relationships. These good consequences could hopefully help the human kind in the difficult path towards happiness, as the positive technology discipline teaches us. Besides the practical benefit of the proposed system, we hope that this concept can stimulate reflections and help people understand the importance of promoting interpersonal touch in the current society. Related Work Since social touch is considered as an essential and primary need of human life, several researchers investigated the possibility of using computers to mediate interpersonal touch over a distance. Hugging is a common means to communicate emotions and show affection to other people. Indeed, many researchers have chosen to adopt the hugging gesture for computer-mediated communication between distant people. Back in 1997, inTouch [15] is one of the first examples of mediated haptic communication. Since then, Haans and IJssenstein reviewed several research projects that aimed at communicated touch gestures through digital means [16]. Hugging is a typical gesture that researchers tried to mediate through wearable systems: in order to simulate the sensation of being hugged, Huggy Pajama [17] and “Hug over a distance” [18] use pneumatic actuators, while HugMe [19] uses an array of vibrating motor and HaptiHug [20] stretches a belt equipped with two soft hands around the chest of the user. Hugs mediated through smart clothes became popular also among the large public: in 2006, the CuteCircuit company presented the Hug Shirt, demonstrating the possibility of sending hugs over a distance with a wellintegrated and stylish smart t-shirt [21]. Nevertheless, a 157 provocative question arises: “can those systems replace human touch?” [22]. Although they allow being in touch with distant relatives, which is often very useful, they obviously cannot offer the same sensation of the contact with a real human. Indeed, Alapack suggests that “nothing, not a fantasy, nor ‘a text vanishing at the click of the mouse’, can compensate for the lack of flesh-toflesh contact in virtual communication and/or relationships” [23]. Hugginess, instead of mediating digital touch between distant relatives, aims at encouraging physical contact with nearby friends and with new acquaintances. At the best of our knowledge, no previous project augmented unmediated human-to-human hugs for digital communication purposes. Handshaking, instead, has been investigated in several projects to share contact information. Zimmerman [24] explored first the idea of sharing contact information, in particular with a handshake, by integrating a near-field transceiver in the shoes. More recently, Wu et al. [25] implemented a similar system with a wrist-worn device, while Ketabdar et al. [26] integrated a handshaking contact information sharing system in a smart ring. While in Zimmerman’s original work [24] the physical contact between people facilitates the transmission of information, in the other two works, [25] and [26], data are transmitted wirelessly through Bluetooth. With our concept, similarly to Zimmerman’s work [24], we aim at stressing the need of physical contact in order to allow the communication of digital information. Concept Hugginess is a concept of interactive system that promotes affective computing beyond computermediated communication. Indeed, while several studies ISWC '14 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 13 - 17, 2014, SEATTLE, WA, USA Hug Kiss … Shoulder pat Poke focused on mediated social touch over a distance [16], Hugginess encourages interpersonal touch and face-toface communication by promoting and rewarding the usage of contact gestures, especially those that occurs in the intimate space of proxemics. Proxemic interactions have been studied also in the domain of ubiquitous computing to model the human interaction with computer [27]. Hugginess, instead, takes into account proxemics with their original meaning, i.e., the typical spatial distances between interacting people [28]. In particular, we are interested in physical distances when people communicate through gestures. In Fig.1, we mapped some occurrences of interpersonal gestures according to the spatial distances defined by Hall [29]. Touch interpersonal gestures such as hugging and kissing fall in the intimate space bubble, while we noticed that most handshaking occurrences happen in the personal space bubble, either in the close or in the far phase. Shoulder pat and poke generally occur in the close phase of the personal space, while some occurrences can be found also in the intimate space. Exchanging contact information through handshaking is a common approach [25] [26] for encouraging physical contact among people, while remaining outside of the intimacy space. Gestures performed in the personal Waving hand space are more appropriate in a formal context, such as a business meeting; however, they lack of the emotional arousal and related positive effects that gestures performed in the intimate space can bring. Hugginess aims at enhancing interpersonal interactions in a more informal context by providing digital information exchange between hugging people. Figure 1. Distance bubbles of Hugginess takes advantage of a smart t-shirt that is proxemics and typical able to detect interpersonal touch and transmit occurrences of interpersonal information through textiles. Moreover, by monitoring gestures. user’s daily interpersonal touch interactions, Hugginess can detect their lack and stimulate his or her relatives to get in contact with them. Since the objective of Hugginess is promoting physical touch, we strived to build a system that reflects the user’s need of physical contact. While existing projects that exchange information with a handshaking rely on a wireless communication, we designed smart t-shirts that need physical contact in order to communicate properly. Moreover, Hugginess t-shirts can modulate the amount of information exchanged according to the length of the hug, but also to the social closeness of the hugged person. For example, a short hug between two unfamiliar people would exchange only the contact name and email of the two people, while a longer hug would exchange also the telephone number and social network contacts. A hug between two people that already hugged in the past, for example two close friends, would exchange more intimate information about their current mood and recent important events of his or her life, rather than the contact information that they already have. Handshake 158 Thanks to the intimacy of the Hugginess interface and to the physical communication channel between the two huggers, the user should be reassured about the privacy of his or her data. The risk of someone stealing his or her data is very low, since no man-in-the-middle attack is possible without a physical interposition between the two huggers. Conversely, this is a typical limitation of wireless based transmissions, which can be sniffed if not adequately encrypted. WORKSHOP: ASGA Interaction and system design Hugging is a natural gesture that we learn since our first days of infancy. Thus, in our concept we aimed at preserving the naturalness of the gesture as much as possible. In order to design the Hugginess smart tshirt, we extrapolated three properties that we consider as a necessary condition for recognizing a hug gesture: Figure 2. Front side and back side of the Hugginess t-shirt. x There is physical contact between the two people’s chest x The two heads are at same height (even if the two people have different heights) x The users’ arms are pressing reciprocal backs The two first conditions are important to locate a contact surface for exchanging data between t-shirts. Since there is a bidirectional flow of information between the two users, two communication channels composed by a transmitter and a receiver are needed. We chose to arrange two conductive patches symmetrically at a fixed distance from the vertical axis and from the shoulder. We made this assumption in order to ensure proper patch contact between people with different body dimensions (males, females, children, adults). Moreover, we have chosen to position the transmitter on the left side of the t-shirt, just above the heart. This design aims at inspiring people by depicting metaphorically a flow of information from the heart when people are hugging. The third condition ensures high arousal during the hug and unintended information exchanges during occasional contacts in crowded environments: in order to activate the exchange of information, both users need to press the other user’s back. As stressed before, the interaction 159 modality of Hugginess ensures data privacy without risks of someone stealing user’s data. The design of the t-shirt is shown in Fig. 2. The t-shirt could work standalone for basic information exchange, without the need of wireless connectivity. In fact, the user can store his or her static contact information in the t-shirt by simply connecting the tshirt to a PC. Nevertheless, important and useful applications arise when the Hugginess t-shirt is paired with a smartphone. Indeed, a smartphone app can log the user’s physical interactions detected by the t-shirt and thus infer a lack of physical contact over a long period. The smartphone app can be location aware and can also provide a proactive behavior to avoid loneliness and lack of physical contact by automatically sending a message to a nearby friend. In Fig. 3, we Figure 3. Mockup of the smartphone application ISWC '14 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 13 - 17, 2014, SEATTLE, WA, USA depict a mockup of the application with a suggestion for hugging a nearby friend, who is lacking physical contact. Proof of concept Figure 4. Test of the prototype for the communication among two Arduino Uno through conductive fabric patches. In order to investigate the feasibility of our concept we developed two smart t-shirts using conductive textiles and two Arduino Uno boards (see Fig. 4). Our prototype aims at investigating the possibility of communicating data between two t-shirts through conductive fabric patches. We tested three different types of silver fabric (rigid, soft and elastic), which all ensured enough conductivity to transmit data at a baud rate of 9600 Bd/s. Since we used the hardware serial port to communicate with a PC over a wired connection, we implemented a software serial port to establish the communication between the two t-shirts. To implement the software serial port, we used the AltSoftSerial library1 that ensures best performance at different baud rates and bidirectional transmission over the TX-RX electrodes. As an additional feasibility test, we developed and tested a pressure sensor placed on the back of the tshirt. The pressure sensor has been implemented using a sheet of Velostat and is used as trigger for starting the communication. Indeed, we also developed a communication protocol based on a three-way handshaking. When the trigger on the back is activated, the t-shirt sends a communication keyword (“AHUG!”) over the fabric communication channel. When this keyword is received, the user’s name is sent over the communication channel. Then, if the receiver does not know this name, i.e., the two people are hugging for the first time, basic contact information is sent over the communication channel; otherwise, i.e., they already met in the past, only new information is sent to the other user. The prototype we developed demonstrates the feasibility of our concept (Fig. 5). Further work is ___________________________ 1 AltSoftSerial Library https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_li bs AltSoftSerial.html Figure 5. Two users wearing the Hugginess t-shirt and hugging for exchanging contact information 160 WORKSHOP: ASGA obviously needed to ensure that the final version of the t-shirt works flawlessly while hugging. Indeed, we experienced some communication problems when the contact was not optimal. Additional tests at different baud rates need to be conducted too. Conclusion and Future Work In this paper, we presented Hugginess: a concept of interactive wearable system that fosters interpersonal social touch through hugging. The system is based upon a smart t-shirt that recognizes hug and transmits digital information through conductive fabric while hugging. We showed a proof of concept that demonstrates the feasibility of the Hugginess concept. As future work we planned to integrate wireless connectivity in the t-shirt and to develop a smartphone app that encourages hugging nearby friends that are lacking physical contact. Finally, we would like to test the t-shirt during a crowded event, similarly to a Free Hugs Campaign [30], in order to get feedback from a large pool of users and at the same time sensitize to the need of fighting the “touch hunger”. Acknowledgements We thank Stefano Carrino for his warm hugs. This work has been supported by Hasler Foundation in the framework of “Living in Smart Environments” project. 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