Investigators:
Carlos Aguiar
Art and Design - ID | Information Science - Informatics | University of Illinois Ubana-Champaign

Students:
Yuhe Cui
Undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design
University of Illinois Ubana-Champaign
Jimmy Guo
Undergraduate in Industrial Design
University of Illinois Ubana-Champaign

Publications:
[1] Carlos Henrique Araujo de Aguiar, Zezhi Guo, and Yuhe Cui. 2023. TOUCH: A Multi-sensory Communication System that Communicates Emotions. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1145/3594806.3594860

[2] Y. Cui, Z. Guo, Y. Wang, X. Peng, J. Park and C. Aguiar, "Doki: A Multi-sensation Interaction Device that Communicates Emotions," 2022 18th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE), Biarritz, France, 2022, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/IE54923.2022.9826782.

Awards:
[1] First place at the White Space Design Challenge, 2022.

Communication Devices

Touch—a multi sensory emotion communication system.

During the COvid-19 pandemic, many people have found themselves physically isolated from each other for long periods. As a consequence, online communication tools have become the primary mean for social interaction among people in quarantine. However, texts and other chatting tools do not adequately transmit the complex emotions hidden behind them. Without the stimulation of sensations from face-to-face communications, people hinder their ability to observe others’ emotions and feelings effectively. In this work, we propose a system that aims to improve emotional communication. We present Touch—a combination of a social media app and a wearable device that can receive and display multi-sensory feedback, including light, digital display, vibrations, and tactile interaction to transfer emotions. While the app encourages interaction between users through virtual spaces, the wearable device further enriches people's communication by offering another means to express emotions not afforded by virtual interactions. Together, these two elements of the Touch project offer a sounding solution to the problem of misunderstanding in communication.

We conducted early user studies (e.g., interviews and surveys) to better understand our users challenges and needs. The result of our understanding is summarized in the “User Journey Map” below.

Our team met several times to brainstorm what possible features our system should have. We used within-group scoring, we ranked these ideas according to the NUF (New, Useful, Feasible) criteria. Following, we began designing our system. Our concept of "Scenes" consisted of unique emojis containing a series of sensory feedback, including lights, vibration, and graphics, as shown in the image the left image below. We also explored multiple kinds of vibrations and soundtracks ranging from the gentlest pulse to the strongest beat,  as depicted in the right image below.

We also had several other iterations of designs of our system (i.e., the app and the device) followed by user studies, as show in the images below.