Affective Touch as Immediate and Passive Wearable Intervention

Abstract

We investigated affective touch as a new pathway to passively mitigate in-the-moment anxiety. While existing mobile interventions offer great promises for health and well-being, they typically focus on achieving long-term effects such as shifting behaviors. As such, most mobile interventions are not applicable to provide immediate help in acute conditions -- when a user experiences a high anxiety level during ongoing events (e.g., completing high-stake tasks or mitigating interpersonal conflicts). A few works have developed passive interventions that are effective in-the-moment by leveraging breathing regulations and biofeedback. In this paper, we drew on neuroscientific findings on affective touch, the slow stroking on hairy skin that can elicit innate pleasantness and evaluated affective touch as a mobile health intervention. To induce affective touch, we first engineered a wearable device that renders a soft stroking sensation on the user's forearm. Then, we conducted a between-group experiment, in which participants underwent high-stress situations with/without receiving affective touch and post-experiment interviews, with 24 participants. Our results showed that participants who received affective touch experienced lower state anxiety and the same physiological stress response level compared to the control group participants. We also found that affective touch facilitated emotion regulation by rendering pleasantness, providing emotional support, and shifting attention. Finally, we discussed the immediate effect of affective touch on anxiety and physiological stress, the benefits of affective touch as a passive intervention, and the implementation considerations to use affective touch in just-in-time systems.