Expressive Biosignals
Collaboration
Psychology
Sensors
Haptics
Synchrobot
May 2022 - April 2023
Research Internship at Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group,
The University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia
Prof. Karon MacLean
Prof. Jun Rekimoto
Keywords
Research Summary
"Physiological Synchrony" is a phenomenon that physiological signals (e.g., heartbeat, respiration, and electrodermal activity) synchronize between individuals. This phenomenon is suggested to correlate with various interpersonal relationships, including teamwork. Since previous research indicated that haptic feedback could change our physiological signals, we hypothesized that receiving haptic feedback on a partner's heartbeat could enhance physiological synchrony and improve the quality of collaboration. We developed haptic robots that moved according to the collaborator's heartbeat and ran a user study to test this hypothesis.
My role
I have led this research as the principal researcher in collaboration with the Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group (SPIN Lab) at the University of British Columbia since May 2022. I spent the 2022 summer (August - September) in Vancouver, Canada, and extensively worked on the project. I was responsible for prototyping and developing the robots, coding programs, leading the user study, and analyzing the data. I developed programs to receive physiological data from Arduino, do socket communication with another laptop to send and receive biosignals, and control the robot according to the speed of the partner's heartbeat. I am analyzing questionnaire data and physiological signals. We plan to submit a paper to a top-tier haptics/HCI conference in December-February, where I will contribute as a first author.
