Haptic Armband

An experimental wearable that allows you to touch someone at a distance

The Haptic Armband is wearable device I developed with the intention of exploring the idea of Digital Intimacy. It was a collaboration between a team in SensiLab and a group in Arts at Monash University. The Arts team were interested in what intimacy could look like in the the social media age, asking questions like “Can you email a hug?” and “what if you could ‘actually’ poke someone on Facebook?”

After a group brainstorming session we came up with the idea of a wearable armband that could ‘squeeze’ your arm after receiving a remote command to do so. I quickly mocked up a rough prototype and we tested it with the group from Arts. Overall the rough prototype convinced us that the idea was interesting enough to continue to develop. However the ‘squeeze’ mechanism (which used a small servo motor to pull the band tighter) didn’t work very well and made a lot of noise. We though that we might be able to achieve a similar result from an array of haptic motors.

The next iteration of the armband was a set of 5 modules, each with a single Linear Resonant Actuator (LRA) haptic motor (by using the newer LRA motors we were able to develop a wide ‘vocabulary’ of haptic sensations). These modules were strung together and wrapped in fabric to create the final armband. A mobile app was developed which created a social network of armband wearers, users were able to draw specific haptic patterns in the app which would then be transmitted and played back on the armband of the person they selected.

Disappointingly the project wasn’t able to undertake any user testing due to the departure of some key members of the team but the ideas were interesting and the device was a fun project to develop.