Distant Handshakes: Conveying Social Intentions Through Multi-Modal Soft Haptic Gloves

Due to the lack of physical touch, social distancing caused by COVID-19 makes it difficult to convey social intentions through handshakes. To mitigate this situation, one promising solution is to simulate distinguishable handshake patterns through haptic feedback devices during distant social communication. This paper reports a distant handshake scheme with multi-modal soft haptic gloves. To address the challenge of duplicating rich haptic stimuli of real handshakes in a compact glove, we extracted four haptic features including grip location, grip strength, skin temperature, and shaking frequency from abundant components of the haptic perception system to mimic handshake behaviors. To guide the interference-free spatial layout of multiple actuators in a limited hand-sized space, we measured the handshake contact area and grip strength of different handshake patterns, which together with the thermosensitivity of the human hand determine the grip location, grip strength, and salient thermal stimulating location. We developed a multi-modal soft haptic glove by rendering four features through pneumatic pressure, thermal, and vibrotactile stimuli, respectively. A user study was conducted to validate the performance of our glove, which set two states for each of the four features, showing over 90% accuracy in distinguishing 16 handshake patterns. Furthermore, a user study on the identification of social intentions yields the finding that distant handshakes with our haptic gloves can convey positive, neutral, and negative social intentions. These results inform the potential of distant handshakes with haptic gloves to convey social intentions in remote interactions including business, politics, and daily life in severe and post-pandemic situations, as well as in future metaverse-based society.