Effect of Haptic Perception on Remote Human-Pet Interaction

Even when a pet owner is away from his/her pet, he/she often wants to feel closer to the pet. The purpose of this study is to provide a means for the pet owner to feel the presence of his/her pet even when away from it; this is achieved by exchange of haptic feedback. In this paper, we describe such a remote haptic interaction system that consists of haptic devices for remote haptic communication; we also utilize tablets for video chat. A pet owner and his/her pet can feel closer to one another via haptic responses generated by corresponding haptic device. Two experimental evaluations were conducted to compare interactions between a pet owner and his/her pet using our system with another interactions achieved only via video chat. Results showed that these remote haptic interactions increased the pet owner’s feeling of communicating with his/her pet. In general, pet owners reported feeling closer to their pet by using our system.