ThermEarhook: Investigating Spatial Thermal Haptic Feedback on the Auricular Skin Area

• DOI: 10.1145/3462244.3479922
• Publication Date: 2021-10-15T14:41:47Z
• Authors: Arshad Nasser; Kexin Zheng; Kening Zhu
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences

Haptic feedbacks are widely adopted in mobile and wearable devices to convey various types of notifications the users. This paper investigates design evaluation thermal haptic feedback on an earable form factor with multiple thermoelectric (i.e. Peltier) modules. We propose ThermEarhook, a device that can provide hot cold stimuli at points auricular skin area. To investigate users' perception area, we develop series ThermEarhook prototypes 3, 4, 5 Peltier While most existing research utilized constant level signal for different users, our pilot study shows thermohaptic threshold varies across locations With user-customized signals around ear, first 12 participants reports selection configuration four TEC modules each side, considering identification accuracy (averagely 99.3%) preference. then conduct three follow-up studies total 36 further evaluate spatial patterns finalize set multi-points be reliably perceived by users average 85.3%. Lastly, discuss user-proposed potential applications ThermEarhook.