Search for: All records

Combined with the unprecedented stress of the COVID-19 crisis and the increase in social unrest, human-caused environmental disasters are having a profound impact on well-being, resulting in a dramatic spike in mental health issues. Studies are emerging daily around concepts of ecological grieving stress, depression, anxiety, and a host of emotions that are surfacing and increasing in our modern times. From eco-nostalgia to eco-anxiety and eco-grief, our responses to climate change, environmental devastation, and social unrest can prevent us from taking positive action, often leading to existential crises. Our proposed project, Haikeus: Transmuting Ecological Grieving into Action, works directly at the interface of some of humanity's wicked problems, which are complex, challenging to solve, and hard to fully understand. The aim of this project is to bring awareness and motivation for transmuting such an emotion into an action through the power of creativity. We further argue that the established methods could facilitate a more nuanced understanding of organizational barriers to communicate its potential value to proceed with the change. 

For the significant global population of individuals who are blind or visually impaired, spatial awareness during navigation remains a challenge. Tactile Electronic Travel Aids have been designed to assist with the provision of spatiotemporal information, but an intuitive method for mapping this information to patterns on a vibrotactile display remains to be determined. This paper explores the encoding of distance from a navigator to an object using two strategies: absolute and relative. A wearable prototype, the HapBack, is presented with two straps of vertically aligned vibrotactile motors mapped to five distances, with each distance mapped to a row on the display. Absolute patterns emit a single vibration at the row corresponding to a distance, while relative patterns emit a sequence of vibrations starting from the bottom row and ending at the row mapped to that distance. These two encoding strategies are comparatively evaluated for identification accuracy and perceived intuitiveness of mapping among ten adult participants who are blind or visually impaired. No significant difference was found between the intuitiveness of the two encodings based on these metrics, with each showing promising results for application during navigation tasks. 

Given that most cues exchanged during a social interaction are nonverbal (e.g., facial expressions, hand gestures, body language), individuals who are blind are at a social disadvantage compared to their sighted peers. Very little work has explored sensory augmentation in the context of social assistive aids for individuals who are blind. The purpose of this study is to explore the following questions related to visual-to-vibrotactile mapping of facial action units (the building blocks of facial expressions): (1) How well can individuals who are blind recognize tactile facial action units compared to those who are sighted? (2) How well can individuals who are blind recognize emotions from tactile facial action units compared to those who are sighted? These questions are explored in a preliminary pilot test using absolute identification tasks in which participants learn and recognize vibrotactile stimulations presented through the Haptic Chair, a custom vibrotactile display embedded on the back of a chair. Study results show that individuals who are blind are able to recognize tactile facial action units as well as those who are sighted. These results hint at the potential for tactile facial action units to augment and expand access to social interactions for individuals who are blind.