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

• Main Authors: KIM, Yuhwan, LEE, Seungchul, HWANG, Inseok, RO, Hyunho, LEE, Youngki, MOON, Miri, SONG, Junehwa
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Electrodermal sensing; High-five; Interpersonal touch; Organization meme; Smartwatch; Social interaction; Workplace; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2658; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3658/viewcontent/High5_pv_oa.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.