Hello.
My name is Roger.
I'm a PhD student at the Augmented Human Lab.
And today I'm here presenting M-Hair,
creating a novel tactile feedback
by augmenting the body hair to respond to magnetic field.
So I would like to start my talk about,
I'll talk about the motivation.
The motivation behind this work is social touch.
Social touch has a really powerful role
in human development.
Shaping social reward, attachment, cognitive,
communication, and emotional regulation
from infancy and throughout life.
The lack of social touch has been linked to different brain
disorders such as autism.
However, social touch is a really complex system.
We sense, we sense touch through our skin,
OK basically we have two types of skin
in one side hairy skin and the other one glamorous skin.
Each of these skins is composed through like different neurons
and mechanoreceptors and they are in charge
to let us sense and interact with the environment.
These mechanoreceptors are located
in different areas of the skin and basically
react to different type of stimulus,
it could be stretching, vibrating et cetera.
Most specific there is one type of mechanoreceptor
that has been linked to social touch which
are like CT afferents.
These ones are merely located in the air follicle,
and the best way to stimulate them
is at about like three centimeters per second
is where they produce more pleasant, and basically
through a gentle stroke and as a deflection.
Inspired and motivated by deficits to the way
I'm presenting M-Hair, where basically we amend the hair
to make it magnetic so we can target the mechanoreceptors
attached to the hair follicle.
M-Hair relates to a non contact haptic interfaces.
In non contact haptic interfaces that are mainly
like two techniques, one will be like acoustic base ultra
haptic is a good example and then the other one
will be air based.
OK so basically the main difference
is M-Hair we target certain type of mechanoreceptors,
for a second I would like you to just blow in your forearm.
So if you blow your forearm like really gentle
OK you didn't feel--
you just feel it right?
Now blowing in your hand, in your palm
you can also feel a perception right?
It is slightly different but you can feel a perception in both.
I'm trying to point this, when for example,
in the case of hair we trigger a cocktail of mechanoreceptors
which basically we perceive in both
in the hairy and the glamorous skin.
In M-Hair basically we just target the ones
that are in the hair follicle.
So if we break the problem that we
tried to solve in two sections we've
having one side what will be like hair
augmentation and the other one hair stimulation.
So first of all the question is like how do we
augment this hair?
The answer is pretty clear is through cosmetics.
OK so we use cosmetics for beauty purposes
we've been using them like right now for example
I'm wearing like wax on my hair.
HCI community has explored cosmetics
through the time to use it as a input interfaces as well
as our output interfaces.
There is also like a certain word
that targets like hair interfaces
basically is more located on the skull hair
where we have like touch--
they enable like a capacitive interface,
and then also like some color automatic
I'm sorry, like changing the color with the temperature
as well as like shaping.
There's also some work about like a week that
enables like communication.
However, there is a problem when we talk about this cosmetics
all these cosmetics on body interfaces
and it's like the electronics.
The electronics are they need to be connected to the extremities
so you can imagine if you have a hair how
do you put some electronics are like a thermo threat attached
to them it's impossible, right.
So in M-Hair what we do is we rely in a type of cosmetics
that we call magnetic cosmetics.
These are, these ones, I must add,
cosmetics that have a high concentration
of ferromagnetic particles such as iron.
Or at some case it could even have
magnetic properties such as rare magnets like neodymium powder.
This cosmetics interact with magnetic field
and basically they enable sensing and actuating.
Interestingly we can find them already
available off the shelf.
OK so I just collect four examples
of available magnetic cosmetics that are there, which have
or high concentration of ferromagnetic particles
or even at some case like an active neodymium particles.
So ultimately in M-Hair what we generate
is a recipe using off the shelf cosmetics.
For example in the demo that I'm doing
I'm just showing this combination
where basically we a ferromagnetic mask that
is normally used as a exfoliant and we mix it
with like wax gel as a carrier.
With this we achieve to have a really easy cosmetic
with having a safe properties.
The way that we apply it is through an eyelash brush
to avoid touch with the skin.
So once we have this hair augmented now is
like how can we stimulate it?
So this hair now reacts to magnetic field.
In our case, what we like--
for the study that we wanted to perform basically we had set up
a certain requirements on the magnetic field,
we wanted to have a precise magnetic field of a like one
centimeter so we can move a magnetic field around.
We target at three centimeters per second,
we wanted to move these at three centimeters per second,
which is the speed that has related to the CT afferents.
Then we wanted to have a surface capable to stimulate
all the body--
all the forearm so about 20 to 30 centimeters,
and we didn't want this actuator to touch the skin or the hair,
so we placed it at about 25 millimeters.
In terms of like the magnetic strength if we compare it
with real like known magnetic fields, in one case,
we have like the magnetic earth that is about 50 microteslas.
We will have like a magnetic from the fields that
are like five teslas.
If we go to MRI machines, it's about three teslas.
For magnetic hair, based on our observations,
we saw that by applying 50 militeslas,
we obtain about one degree of deformation for the hair.
So it's a quite strong magnetic field, the one that we need.
There are main two techniques right
now to stimulate-- to generate magnetic fields are
through permanent magnets or electromagnet,
so in this case based on our requirements
we decided to go with permanent magnet.
The way that we achieve this basically we
mount this permanent magnet on a CNC machine,
and then we were able to stimulate it
at the speed that we wanted and with a pretty high accuracy.
This is example.
So with this machine we perform a formative study
with six participants with the goal
to understand the sensation that we were generating.
By now in this presentation we will
be talking on a couple of details in the paper
you'll find more.
So one of the things that we want to understand
is like how this discriminative was this sensation?
So basically we perform like a subset
of shapes in different locations and in different sizes
through the body.
And on the board, what will be the group a
is different locations, b will be the sizes,
and c is the shapes.
On the shapes the users were asked to draw by themselves,
so they didn't have any reference.
So we can observe some degree of this discriminative perception
which is honestly higher than what we expected.
However, the interesting part is on the subjective description.
So the participants were also stimulated during one minute
with this haptic sensation and we asked
them to provide with five--
with words that describe their sensation.
From the six participants we got about 25 votes
and these are a collection of them.
So all of them reported the sensation
to be windy, as well as five of them pleasant, touch,
and then we highlight some comments
of like unique, ticklish, gentle, et cetera.
So all these words according to the affective rating
are associated with positive balance
and slightly calm arousal.
So with this work we show the potential
behind hair augmentation and hair stimulation,
we can observe--
we can see our work opening two main areas
for further exploration.
On one side there's the theoretical
where basically upstream research could deeply
understand-- could further explore what
type of haptic sensation are we performing
and what are the mechanoreceptors that we are
triggering, as well as applied research
to militarize this in order to enable interactions
in the interactions and applications.
With this I conclude my talk.
I also have a demo and you can come and feel how it like--
evaluate how it feels.
Thank you.
OK we have time for a bunch of questions.
All right, while we wait I have a question.
So I was wondering did you do any experimentation with sort
of fast attraction and repel off the first do
more complex part of that could be higher frequency to I
don't know, maybe invoke some other sensations?
So in this particular basically we didn't evaluate
this part of the meeting that we were already was
that discriminative as well as the--
discriminative as well as their subjective description.
Yeah, but it's a really good point and something
that we would like to do also in future work.
Any other questions?
I have one more.
So what about the safety on one hand and on the other hand,
how do you clear this off when you're done
with your magnetic experience?
So this I mean, this cosmetics are basically like really
easy to remove.
So just like water on the toilet just
go away, in terms of safety is a really good question is one
of the main reasons why we decide to go with off the shelf
cosmetics even though when we talk about like cosmetics
most of them have--
they have already ferromagnetic particles like iron oxide.
So it's quite they are inside the safety concerns.
The main reason for example that we
didn't evaluate the rapidly changing frequencies
because when you put the human body with a magnetic field
then you need to have certain regulations.
OK.
Thank you.
So let's give the author another set of applause.