Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: Computational Design and Application of Wearable Haptic Knits

Social touch is a natural mode of communication between people and better understanding of how to convey social touch mechanistically will result in new forms of communication and increased capabilities of wearable devices that improve human health and quality of life. The importance of social touch is becoming more evident as we increase remote communication through email, text messages and videoconferencing. Prior work has shown that social touch can be replicated through wearable and holdable devices, but current devices are bulky and impractical. This research will combine principles of soft robotics and knit textiles of varying stiffness to design and fabricate a new kind of soft wearable haptic device, in which careful specification of stitch size, placement, and material in a knit sleeve will control the deformation of pneumatic bladders that apply force to the wearer. Project outcomes will advance knowledge in the field of social touch and human perception, and will lay the foundation for a variety of other types of knit-textile-based devices, including soft assistive devices. Additional broad impact will derive from activities designed to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering through lab tours, outreach programs, and mentoring of students from groups that are underrepresented in engineering, and by making project findings available to a wide audience through an open-source materials library. Current soft wearable devices are bulky and impractical because they need stiff frames to ensure load transmission. The pixel-like control of material properties afforded by multi-material and multi-stitch knit textiles, on the other hand, can redirect force transmission to precise deformation modes efficiently and with a low profile. This project approaches designing, fabricating, and testing knit-enabled wearable devices in three thrusts. The first thrust will model and optimize knits to achieve target load and deformation profiles by using a combination of experimental material characterization and multiscale modeling to harness the full capabilities of the modern knitting process. The second thrust will design, fabricate, and test wearable pneumatic devices, including consideration for donning and doffing, actuator integration and interfacing, and device characterization. The third thrust will implement and test social touch cues using the device with pre-programmed haptic emojis and display of teleoperated social touch queues in real time. Taken together, these thrusts will create new forms of communication and lead to increased capabilities of wearable devices that improve human health and quality of life. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.