Exploring Haptic Feedback for Common Message Notification Between Intimate Couples with Smartwatches

Abstract

In this paper, we explore haptic feedback for smartwatches (i.e., vibrations) as a means to transmit the conversational meaning of short text messages through a non-visual mode of communication between intimate people. The current use of smartwatch vibrations is limited to basic patterns to convey simple information such as notifying users on an incoming phone call or a text message. We envision the use of vibrations to notify commonly exchanged messages between intimate ones by providing discreet feedback on their wrist. This form of communication preserves the flow of users’ primary activities without making them to look at the display, supporting unobtrusive interaction. We start our exploration by examining the common short text messages that intimate people, like couples, exchange in their daily life. We next investigate the vibration properties such as vibration duration and number of vibrations that are suitable to convey the meaning of these messages. We further examine users’ accuracy of detecting and extracting the meaning of messages from vibrations where our results report an accuracy of 95% while perceiving the correct meanings. We conclude with design recommendations for using such vibrational feedback for communicating information with intimate partners.