Affective tele-touch

Abstract

Classical works have described how touch therapy has been effective in the recovery and good appetite of children in hospitals. This paper proposes an affective tele-touch system prototype customized for therapeutic touches over the Internet. The affective contact area was designated to the posterior forearm surface where three stimuli were made available: vibration, warmth, and tickle. Affective tele-touches could be applied either with a sensory haptic device. We have conducted touch therapy experiments with this system to look at the experimental subjects' recovery from video-induced sadness with heartbeat rates as the psycho-physiological measurement indicator. Our results show that a touch from a human hand or a tele-touch was able to reduce heartbeat rates of the participants after they watched a sad video clip. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.