Tattered Teddies and Pentagram Charms: How People Use Touchable Comfort Objects and What This Means for Designing Affective Haptic Systems

Paper Title

Tattered Teddies and Pentagram Charms: How People Use Touchable Comfort Objects and What This Means for Designing Affective Haptic Systems

Publication Info

• Topic area: Exploration of Touchable Comfort Objects (TCOs) for emotion regulation and their implications for designing affective haptic systems.
• Keywords: Touchable Comfort Objects, emotion regulation, affective haptics, user profiles, personalization, emotional comfort, interaction design, technology augmentation, haptic systems, emotional well-being.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research on TCOs and affective haptic systems is largely lab-based, with limited understanding of real-world practices, user needs, and diverse demographics. There is also a lack of participatory design approaches and insights into how technology could enhance TCOs for emotional regulation.
• Significance: Understanding how people use TCOs can inform the design of technology-augmented objects that better support emotional regulation, social-emotional agency, and communication facilitation, addressing unmet needs in everyday contexts.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have shown that touch and comfort objects play a role in emotional regulation, but these have focused on static, non-interactive objects or short-term lab studies. Emerging affective haptic systems (e.g., Haptic Creature, Ommie) have explored interactive designs but lack grounding in diverse, real-world user practices. This paper addresses these gaps by analyzing how individuals use TCOs and envision their technological augmentation.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A mixed-methods study involving a survey of 132 participants to explore TCO use, identify user profiles, and derive design implications for affective haptic systems.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of a dimensional space framework to systematically study TCOs.
  2. Identification of four user profiles: Physical Soothers, Frodo Fidgeters, Sentimental Functionalists, and Private Nostalgia-Cuddlers.
  3. Open-sourced dataset and interactive visualization dashboard for exploring TCO characteristics and user preferences.
  4. Design directions and interaction paradigms tailored to user needs and aspirations for technology-augmented TCOs.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted an online survey with 132 participants, capturing quantitative and qualitative data on TCO characteristics, usage, and aspirations.
  • Developed a dimensional space with 69 dimensions across six blocks (e.g., TCO description, relationships, interactions).
  • Applied hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) to identify user profiles.
  • Analyzed gaps in current TCOs and preferences for technological augmentation.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • TCOs are chosen for both emotional significance and physical soothing, with frequent, short interactions (e.g., holding, rubbing, fidgeting).
  • Four user profiles were identified:
    1. Physical Soothers: Prefer soft, zoomorphic objects like stuffed toys for physical soothing.
    2. Frodo Fidgeters: Use small, wearable objects like jewelry for fidgeting and emotional significance.
    3. Sentimental Functionalists: Value utility objects with functional and emotional significance.
    4. Private Nostalgia-Cuddlers: Use larger, soft objects like stuffed toys for private, nostalgic comfort.
  • Half of participants reported unmet needs, including limitations in high-intensity emotional situations, unsuitable usage settings, and social stigma.
  • Preferences for technology-augmented TCOs included emotion-aware interactions (64% positive), social-emotional agency (59%), and communication facilitation (58%), though concerns about privacy, autonomy, and over-reliance were noted.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Provides a comprehensive, real-world understanding of TCO use across diverse demographics.
  • Offers actionable insights for designing context-aware, personalized, and adaptive affective haptic systems.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Survey design validated through pilot testing and iterative refinement.
  • Data analyzed using mixed-methods approaches, including statistical tests, qualitative coding, and clustering.
  • Visualization dashboard developed for exploratory data analysis and public access.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Sample skewed towards young adults (87% under 35) and higher education levels.
  • Limited representation of older adults and non-English speakers.
  • Cross-sectional design may not capture longitudinal changes in TCO use.
  • Future work could include longitudinal studies, participatory design workshops, and exploration of specialized populations.

Summary

This study investigates how people use Touchable Comfort Objects (TCOs) for emotion regulation and explores the potential for technology-augmented TCOs. Through a survey of 132 participants, the authors identified four user profiles and documented diverse preferences and unmet needs. The findings highlight opportunities for designing affective haptic systems that are personalized, context-aware, and supportive of emotional well-being. The study provides a dimensional framework, open-source dataset, and design guidelines to inform future research and development in this domain.