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1. Move or be moved: The design of a haptic-tangible manipulative for paired digital education interactives

   Lambert, S G; Tennison, J L; Mitchell, K; Moore, E B; Gorlewicz, J L (June 2024, Eurohaptics Conference)

   One of the current limitations in digital educational experiences is the lack of touch. Touch is a critical component in the learning process and in creating inclusive educational experiences for sensorially diverse learners. From haptic devices to tangible user interfaces (TUI), a growing body of research is investigating ways to bring touch back into the digital world, yet many focus on a specific dimension (e.g. haptic feedback or kinesthetic manipulation) of touch. Learning, however, is a multi-dimensional touch experience - it is about moving and being moved. This work presents the Action Quad - a novel haptic-TUI design for teaching geometry (specifically quadrilaterals). The Action Quad is a multi-point-of-contact, reconfigurable tool that synergizes the affordances of both kinesthetic interaction and haptic feedback into a single form factor. We present findings from an initial user study (N=11) investigating how sighted- hearing individuals approach, interact, and experience the Action Quad, and we present a case study with an individual with blindness. We share key takeaways from the design process and participant feedback on interactions with this novel haptic-TUI device, sharing design insights on an emerging area of research that could support a new class of educational learning tools rooted in touch. 

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2. Multichannel Sensorimotor Integration with a Dexterous Artificial Hand

   https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics13070097  

   Abd, Moaed A; Engeberg, Erik D (July 2024, Robotics)

   People use their hands for intricate tasks like playing musical instruments, employing myriad touch sensations to inform motor control. In contrast, current prosthetic hands lack comprehensive haptic feedback and exhibit rudimentary multitasking functionality. Limited research has explored the potential of upper limb amputees to feel, perceive, and respond to multiple channels of simultaneously activated haptic feedback to concurrently control the individual fingers of dexterous prosthetic hands. This study introduces a novel control architecture for three amputees and nine additional subjects to concurrently control individual fingers of an artificial hand using two channels of context-specific haptic feedback. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) recognize subjects’ electromyogram (EMG) patterns governing the artificial hand controller. ANNs also classify the directions objects slip across tactile sensors on the robotic fingertips, which are encoded via the vibration frequency of wearable vibrotactile actuators. Subjects implement control strategies with each finger simultaneously to prevent or permit slip as desired, achieving a 94.49% ± 8.79% overall success rate. Although no statistically significant difference exists between amputees’ and non-amputees’ success rates, amputees require more time to respond to simultaneous haptic feedback signals, suggesting a higher cognitive load. Nevertheless, amputees can accurately interpret multiple channels of nuanced haptic feedback to concurrently control individual robotic fingers, addressing the challenge of multitasking with dexterous prosthetic hands. 

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3. Altering Perceived Softness of Real Rigid Objects by Restricting Fingerpad Deformation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474800  

   Tao, Yujie; Teng, Shan-Yuan; Lopes, Pedro (October 2021, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology)

   We propose a haptic device that alters the perceived softness of real rigid objects without requiring to instrument the objects. Instead, our haptic device works by restricting the user's fingerpad lateral deformation via a hollow frame that squeezes the sides of the fingerpad. This causes the fingerpad to become bulgier than it originally was—when users touch an object's surface with their now-restricted fingerpad, they feel the object to be softer than it is. To illustrate the extent of softness illusion induced by our device, touching the tip of a wooden chopstick will feel as soft as a rubber eraser. Our haptic device operates by pulling the hollow frame using a motor. Unlike most wearable haptic devices, which cover up the user's fingerpad to create force sensations, our device creates softness while leaving the center of the fingerpad free, which allows the users to feel most of the object they are interacting with. This makes our device a unique contribution to altering the softness of everyday objects, creating “buttons” by softening protrusions of existing appliances or tangibles, or even, altering the softness of handheld props for VR. Finally, we validated our device through two studies: (1) a psychophysics study showed that the device brings down the perceived softness of any object between 50A-90A to around 40A (on Shore A hardness scale); and (2) a user study demonstrated that participants preferred our device for interactive applications that leverage haptic props, such as making a VR prop feel softer or making a rigid 3D printed remote control feel softer on its button. 

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4. Whose Touch is This? : Understanding the Agency Trade-Off Between User-Driven Touch vs. Computer-Driven Touch

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3489608  

   Tajima, Daisuke; Nishida, Jun; Lopes, Pedro; Kasahara, Shunichi (June 2022, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction)

   Force-feedback enhances digital touch by enabling users to share non-verbal aspects such as rhythm, poses, and so on. To achieve this, interfaces actuate the user’s to touch involuntarily (using exoskeletons or electrical-muscle-stimulation); we refer to this as computer-driven touch. Unfortunately, forcing users to touch causes a loss of their sense of agency. While researchers found that delaying the timing of computer-driven touch preserves agency, they only considered the naïve case when user-driven touch is aligned with computer-driven touch. We argue this is unlikely as it assumes we can perfectly predict user-touches. But, what about all the remainder situations: when the haptics forces the user into an outcome they did not intend or assists the user in an outcome they would not achieve alone? We unveil, via an experiment, what happens in these novel situations. From our findings, we synthesize a framework that enables researchers of digital-touch systems to trade-off between haptic-assistance vs. sense-of-agency. 

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5. Haptic paradigms for multimodal interactive simulations

   Tennison, J. L.; Greenberg, J.; Moore, E. B.; & Gorlewicz, J. L. (January 2021, Journal on technology and persons with disabilities)

   Touch is often omitted or viewed as unnecessary in digital learning. Lack of touch feedback limits the accessibility and multimodal capacity of digital educational content. Touchscreens with vibratory, haptic feedback are prevalent, yet this kind of feedback is often under-utilized. This work provides initial investigations into the design, development, and use of vibratory feedback within multimodal, interactive, educational simulations on touchscreen devices by learners with and without visual impairments. The objective of this work is to design and evaluate different haptic paradigms that could support interaction and learning in educational simulations. We investigated the implementation of four haptic paradigms in two physics simulations. Interviews were conducted with eight learners (five sighted learners; three learners with visual impairments) on one simulation and initial results are shared. We discuss the learner outcomes of each paradigm and how they impact design and development moving forward. 

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