Tactile Hand Gesture Recognition through Haptic Feedback for Affective Online Communication

Our study explores how individuals communicate emotions using tactile hand gestures and provides evidence supporting the link between emotions and gestures to investigate the usability of tactile hand gestures for emotional online communication. Tactile hand gestures are used as the source of information to get to emotions. In this study, behavioral aspects of tactile hand gestures being used for emotional interaction are observed through a sensory input device and analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA). In user experiments, subjects perform tactile hand gestures on the sensory input device in the response of a list of distinct emotions (i.e. excited, happy, relaxed, sleepy, tired, lonely, angry and alarmed). An analytical method is used to recognize gestures in terms of signal parameters such as intensity, temporal frequency, spatial frequency and pattern correlation. We found that different emotions are statistically associated with different tactile hand gestures. This research introduces a new way of creating online emotional communication devices that approximate the use of natural tactile hand gestures in face-to-face communication.