Haptic interaction study and application to haptic mobile design for online communication.

This study explores how individuals communicate emotions using tactile hand gestures and investigates the usability of applying tactile hand gestures for emotional online communication. Tactile hand gestures are used as the source of information to express emotions in distance communications. In this study, behavioral aspects of tactile hand gestures used for emotional interaction are observed through a sensory input device and analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA). In user experiments, subjects perform tactile hand gestures on the sensory input device to illustrate a list of 8 distinct emotions (i.e. excited, happy, relaxed, sleepy, tired, lonely, angry and alarmed). An analytical method is used to classify gestures in terms of signal parameters such as intensity, temporal frequency, spatial frequency and pattern correlation. I found that different emotions are statistically associated with different tactile hand gestures. From the research outcome data, I also introduce the design of online emotional communication devices that aim to mimic natural tactile hand gestures used in the face-to-face communication.