Walking is an essential activity for a healthy life, which becomes less tiring and more enjoyable if done together. Common difficulties we have in performing sufficient physical exercise, for instance the lack of motivation, can be overcome by exploiting its social aspect. However, our lifestyle sometimes makes it very difficult to find time together with others who live far away from us to go for a walk. In this article, we propose a novel system enabling people to have a ‘remote social walk’ by streaming the gait cadence between two persons walking in different places, increasing the sense of mutual presence. Vibrations provided at the users‘ ankles display the partner's sensation perceived during the heel-strike. In order to achieve the aforementioned goal in a two users experiment, we envisaged a four-step incremental validation process: i) a single walker has to adapt the cadence with a virtual reference generated by a software; ii) a single user is tasked to follow a predefined time-varying gait cadence; iii) a leader-follower scenario in which the haptic actuation is mono-directional; iv) a peer-to-peer case with bi-directional haptic communication. Careful experimental validation was conducted involving a total of 50 participants, which confirmed the efficacy of our system in perceiving the partners’ gait cadence in each of the proposed scenarios.

中文翻译：

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用于远程社交步行的可穿戴触觉技术

步行是健康生活必不可少的活动，如果一起进行，它会变得不那么累，更有趣。我们在进行充分体育锻炼时遇到的常见困难，例如缺乏动力，可以通过利用其社交方面来克服。然而，我们的生活方式有时让我们很难抽出时间与住在离我们很远的人一起去散步。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的系统，通过流式传输在不同地方行走的两个人之间的步态节奏，增加相互存在感，使人们能够进行“远程社交步行”。在用户脚踝处提供的振动显示了在脚跟撞击期间感知到的伙伴的感觉。为了在两个用户的实验中实现上述目标，我们设想了一个四步增量验证过程：i) 单个步行者必须使用软件生成的虚拟参考来调整节奏；ii) 单个用户的任务是遵循预定义的时变步态节奏；iii) 一个领导者-跟随者场景，其中触觉驱动是单向的；iv) 具有双向触觉通信的点对点案例。总共有 50 名参与者进行了仔细的实验​​验证，这证实了我们的系统在每个提议的场景中感知合作伙伴步态节奏的有效性。