Nowadays, touch remains essential for emotional conveyance and interpersonal communication as more interactions are mediated remotely. While many studies have discussed the effectiveness of using haptics to communicate emotions, incorporating affect into haptic design still faces challenges due to individual user tactile acuity and preferences. We assessed the conveying of emotions using a two-channel haptic display, emphasizing individual differences. First, 24 participants generated 187 haptic messages reflecting their immediate sentiments after watching 8 emotionally charged film clips. Afterwards, 19 participants were asked to identify emotions from haptic messages designed by themselves and others, yielding 593 samples. Our findings suggest potential links between haptic message decoding ability and emotional traits, particularly Emotional Competence (EC) and Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). Additionally, qualitative analysis revealed three strategies participants used to create touch messages: perceptive, empathetic, and metaphorical expression.

The Head Mounted Keyboard (HMK) is a text input method that attaches a physical split keyboard to the head mounted display (HMD). It allows high-speed text input by utilizing the touch-typing skills that many PC users have. However, numeric input with HMK is challenging because the user cannot see the keyboard. Our solution is a hybrid technique that combines HMK with head pointing. The technique, inputs letters via the HMK while numeric input uses head pointing to a virtual keyboard. In an experiment on typing tasks, the proposed technique outperforms the conventional alternatives. Some application examples were implemented to explore the application space of the technique.

In this paper, we propose an alternative motion planning method for a wearable robot with a variable stride length and walking speed. Trajectories are planned in a joint space rather than a workspace to avoid an ill-posed problem with no solution in inverse kinematics, and to consider the joint's range of motion, maximum velocity, foot clearance, and backward balance. The joint trajectories are represented by minimum jerk trajectories. Two via-points are assigned, and the parameters (angle and angular velocity) at the via-points are determined by applying an inverted pendulum model or optimization to satisfy the constraints. The fastest gait pattern generated by the proposed algorithm was twice as fast as the pattern generated by the workspace-based planning method. We confirmed that the fastest walking pattern of 0.36 m/s was feasible on a treadmill, and a walking pattern of 0.27 m/s was found for walking across the floor with a walker. Furthermore, the proposed method required approximately 65% of the electric power for the workspace-based method for the same walking speed and stride length. These results suggest that the proposed motion planning method is effective at generating a high-speed and efficient gait pattern for a wearable robot.

A new signal demodulation system for CDMA receivers is proposed. This system has an effective function of canceling the interference noise components in the received symbol frames. For a target symbol frame to be detected, the differential frames are produced, each of which is made by subtracting one of the neighboring symbol frames from the target frame. The interference noise being left in some of the differential frames is much less than that in the target frame. By demodulating only such noise cancelled differential frames that have been estimated with effective analyzing sequences, the information conveyed on the target frame with a heavy interference can be detected. The simulation indicates powerful canceling performance for all the possible interference disturbance is achieved.