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While a significant body of empirical studies has focused on designers’ creativity, inspiration and fixation, by manipulating a number of variables, designers themselves have created inspiration-su...

In order to design tactile devices for technologically mediated communication, we investigated what tactile and gestural interactions would be spontaneously used for sharing emotions in mediated communication. In an experiment with 40 participants, we identified relations between hand gestures performed with a concept device and emotions that a “sender” intends to convey to a “receiver”. Among others, our results show that squeezing and shaking are the most popular chosen hand gesture interaction. Gesture intensity and speed follow the arousal (intensity) and temperature follows the valence (pleasure). Emotions that subjects are most are willing to share with such a tactile are gratitude, love, happy, sad, astonished, excited, angry and worried.

The non-contact measurement of the propagation characteristics in the human body using pass-through airborne ultrasound has been proposed. Detection and evaluation of airborne ultrasound passed through the heel have been reported. However, estimation of the speed of sound (SOS) in the heel is difficult due to large attenuation of the pass-through ultrasound. In this paper, airborne ultrasound passed through the wrist is studied. The pass-through ultrasound can be detected by pulse compression using more than 16th-order M-sequence. Attenuation of the pass-through ultrasound or the estimated SOSs in the wrist are different by the transducer position. When the transducers are set at the center of the wrist, attenuation and the SOS are 86.2 dB and 1780 m/s, respectively.

The elastic properties of human tissues can be quantitatively evaluated from the ultrasonic propagation speed in tissues. To effectively propagate ultrasound in human tissues, ultrasonic transducers are typically brought into contact with tissue surfaces. In this study, the non-contact evaluation of human tissues using pass-through airborne ultrasound has been proposed. When airborne ultrasound propagates and passes through tissues, the pass-through wave is extremely attenuated. To detect the attenuated pass-through wave in the received signal, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal is improved by pulse compression using a higher-order M-sequence in the proposed method. In this paper, the estimation of ultrasonic propagation speeds in tissue-mimicking phantoms is described. The urethane-rubber phantom and solutions of ethanol in water are used as the phantoms. The time of flight (TOF) of the pass-through wave in the phantom is determined from the wave front. The propagation speed in the phantom is estimated using the determined TOF. Propagation speeds in the urethane-rubber phantom and ethanol solutions can be estimated within errors of 3 and 2% in experiments.