Towards Caring Touch From Technologies: Knowledge From Healthcare PractitionersShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings , Association for Computing Machinery , 2025Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
We present a qualitative study with five healthcare experts specialised in different types of touch practice to gain insight in how caring touch can be enacted. Through our analysis we focus on how to transfer this learning into design considerations towards enacting caring touch from technologies. Despite the rapidly growing expectation for and design interest in touch from technologies intending to enhance care and well-being, the knowledge on how to design caring touch is still fragmented. How caring touch is enacted in inter-personal touch is under-explored and such expertise from healthcare practitioners has not been engaged from the perspective of HCI design research. We propose designers to consider caring as an experiential quality instead of a division between instrumental types of touch and caring types. We recommend when designing for a caring quality in technology-initiated touch that designers create a progression of touch with dynamic sensitivity and adapt the materiality of actuating devices to the plural dimensions of the body’s textures.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery , 2025.
Keywords [en]
Industrial robots; Intelligent robots; Patient treatment; Assistive robots; Care robotic; Caring touch; Experiential qualities; Haptic design; Haptics; Healthcare practitioner; Qualitative study; Robot-initiated touch; Social robotics; Social robots
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-78608DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713736Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105005741195OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-78608DiVA, id: diva2:1965788
Conference
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2025. Yokohama. 26 April 2025 through 1 May 2025
Note
Co-funded by the European Union (ERC, Intimate Touch, 101043637), Digital Futures, and Vetenskapsrådet (2019-03762-VR)
2025-06-092025-06-092025-06-09Bibliographically approved