At Bell Lab’s internship program (summer 2019) , my team was given the following challenge:

Can we go beyond the limitations of spoken and written word in emotional communication?

We addressed this question by combining three key concepts:  

• Music is the language of sharing emotion 

• the principles of neuroplasticity can enable us to investigate extrasensory emotional communication

• Haptics may be the sensory input which enables a new layer to emotion-sharing

The result indicated that users were able to identify the emotion presented by the haptic message. However, unlike music, the haptic feedback failed to evoke those emotions.

We concluded that in order to successfully communicate emotions via tactile feedback, we need to design technologies that integrate pressure and temperature output to replicate the power of communication via touch.