Amisa: a pilot study of an emotional supporting device between friends over long-distance

Abstract

Under the rigid regulation of Chinese 985-Project sponsored university entrance exam for 2.09% in 2018, the new generation of Chinese teenagers usually have to leave their province to another city which is thousand miles away from home. This means that these young adults have to leave familiar family support network and deal with homesickness earlier than other countries. Such lonely experience will affect these young adults who usually grew up as the middle class in the modern Chinese society. Friendship is the only support these young adults will get. And the hug from friends are their most missed interactions. Our research intends to develop an interactive device that can transfer their experience into a supporting comfort system that can provide warm awareness and inter-personal relationship. This paper reports our pilot study: an eMotional Supporting Awareness system (AMISA) as a haptic affect support system that supports affective communication with friends over long-distance. The approach of this study is user centered design, through user interviews and literature reviews, we defined the user requirements and found corresponding technology in HCI to prototype the conceptual design. We developed AMISA from three dimensions: (1) affective analysis; (2) mediated social touch; (3) user experience. Subsequently, we conducted a user evaluation of the prototype, AMISA is used as a data collector to observe user interactions for iterating subsequent design outcomes.