The CHAT System: A Wearable Haptic System for Facilitating Tactile Communication

Despite the richness of the human tactile capacity, remote communication practices often lack touch-based interactions. This leads to overtaxing our visual and auditory channels, a lack of connection and engagement, and inaccessibility for diverse sensory groups. In this paper, we learn from haptic intuitions of the blind and low vision (BLV) and the Protactile DeafBlind (PT-DB) community to investigate how core functions of communication can be routed through tactile channels. We investigate this re-routing by designing the Conversational Haptic Technology (CHAT) system, a wearable haptic system to explore the feasibility of language recreation through core functions of communication and emotional expression via touch. We contribute the design evolution of an input (sensing) pad and an output (actuation) pad, which enable a bidirectional, wireless system to support remote, touch-based communication. These systems were iteratively evaluated through a series of user studies with sighted-hearing (N=20), BLV (N=4), and PT-DB (N=7) participants to uncover touch profiles for relaying specific communication functions and emotional responses. Results indicate trends and similarities in the touch-based cues organically employed across the diverse groups and provide an initial framework for demonstrating the feasibility of communicating core functions through touch in a wearable form factor.