High5: promoting interpersonal hand-to-hand touch for vibrant workplace with electrodermal sensor watches

Interpersonal touch is our most primitive social language strongly governing our emotional well-being. Despite the positive implications of touch in many facets of our daily social interactions, we find wide-spread caution and taboo limiting touch-based interactions in workplace relationships that constitute a significant part of our daily social life. In this paper, we explore new opportunities for ubicomp technology to promote a new meme of casual and cheerful interpersonal touch such as high-fives towards facilitating vibrant workplace culture. Specifically, we propose High5, a mobile service with a smartwatch-style system to promote high-fives in everyday workplace interactions. We first present initial user motivation from semi-structured interviews regarding the potentially controversial idea of High5. We then present our smartwatch-style prototype to detect high-fives based on sensing electric skin potential levels. We demonstrate its key technical observation and performance evaluation.

[1]  H. Harlow,et al.  Learning to Love , 2019, Love, Inc..

[2]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  Demo: e-gesture - a collaborative architecture for energy-efficient gesture recognition with hand-worn sensor and mobile devices , 2011, MobiSys '11.

[3]  R. Granit.  THE HEART ( Extract from “ Principles and Applications of Bioelectric and Biomagnetic Fields , 2005 .

[4]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  "almost touching": parent-child remote communication using the sharetable system , 2013, CSCW.

[5]  D. Swanson.  In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work , 2001 .

[6]  Berry Eggen,et al.  Designing playful interactions for social interaction and physical play , 2010, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[7]  Laura K. Guerrero,et al.  Types of touch in cross-sex relationships between coworkers: perceptions of relational and emotional messages, inappropriateness, and sexual harassment , 2001 .

[8]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[9]  Stanley E. Jones.  The Right Touch: Understanding and Using the Language of Physical Contact , 1994 .

[10]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  Exploring inter-child behavioral relativity in a shared social environment: a field study in a kindergarten , 2010, UbiComp.

[11]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  TalkBetter: family-driven mobile intervention care for children with language delay , 2014, CSCW.

[12]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  ExerLink: enabling pervasive social exergames with heterogeneous exercise devices , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[13]  Stanley E. Jones,et al.  A naturalistic study of the meanings of touch , 1985 .

[14]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  E-Gesture: a collaborative architecture for energy-efficient gesture recognition with hand-worn sensor and mobile devices , 2011, SenSys.

[15]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  SocioPhone: everyday face-to-face interaction monitoring platform using multi-phone sensor fusion , 2013, MobiSys '13.

[16]  N. Hoffart.  Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory , 2000 .

[17]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  CoMon: cooperative ambience monitoring platform with continuity and benefit awareness , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[18]  Roshan Lalintha Peiris,et al.  Huggy Pajama: a mobile parent and child hugging communication system , 2008, IDC.

[19]  Daniel Jackson,et al.  The break-time barometer: an exploratory system forworkplace break-time social awareness , 2013, UbiComp.

[20]  Ben Congleton,et al.  The context, content & community collage: sharing personal digital media in the physical workplace , 2008, CSCW.

[21]  Masamichi Shimosaka,et al.  Hand shape classification with a wrist contour sensor: development of a prototype device , 2011, UbiComp '11.

[22]  Ivan Poupyrev,et al.  Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects , 2012, CHI.

[23]  Gwenn Englebienne,et al.  Classifying social actions with a single accelerometer , 2013, UbiComp.

[24]  C. Spence,et al.  The science of interpersonal touch: An overview , 2010, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[25]  Abraham Carmeli,et al.  The relationship between emotional intelligence and work attitudes, behavior and outcomes: An examination among senior managers , 2003 .

[26]  Fredric E. Rabinowitz.  The Male-to-Male Embrace: Breaking the Touch Taboo in a Men's Therapy Group. , 1991 .

[27]  Kazuo Yano,et al.  Relationship between Physical Behaviors of Students and Their Scholastic Performance , 2013, 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing and 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Autonomic and Trusted Computing.

[28]  Inseok Hwang,et al.  Leveraging Children's Behavioral Distribution and Singularities in New Interactive Environments: Study in Kindergarten Field Trips , 2012, Pervasive.