High5: promoting interpersonal hand-to-hand touch for vibrant workplace with electrodermal sensor watches

Interpersonal touch is our most primitive social language strongly governing our emotional well-being. Despite the positive implications of touch in many facets of our daily social interactions, we find wide-spread caution and taboo limiting touch-based interactions in workplace relationships that constitute a significant part of our daily social life. In this paper, we explore new opportunities for ubicomp technology to promote a new meme of casual and cheerful interpersonal touch such as high-fives towards facilitating vibrant workplace culture. Specifically, we propose High5, a mobile service with a smartwatch-style system to promote high-fives in everyday workplace interactions. We first present initial user motivation from semi-structured interviews regarding the potentially controversial idea of High5. We then present our smartwatch-style prototype to detect high-fives based on sensing electric skin potential levels. We demonstrate its key technical observation and performance evaluation.