ABSTRACT
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, many countries and political states enforced different levels of social distancing measures to mitigate the spread of the virus within their communities. These actions considerably restricted physical touch interactions, resulting in touch starvation and heightened stress among individuals. We tackled this challenge by concentrating on self-touch as a means of touch engagement and developed a system that integrates a fabric-based touch sensor with a supportive voice feature to promote self-touch activities. We experimentally investigated how effectively our system fostered self-touch behaviors and its potential for alleviating stress in high-pressure settings. Our experimental data revealed that the system did indeed promote self-touch practices, although significant stress-reduction effects were only observed among men.
