Understanding Desire to Touch Using Large-scale Twitter Data
Yusuke Ujitoko · NTT technical review · 2023
I and research colleagues investigated people's desire to touch by collecting and analyzing a large amount of text data that contain phrases such as "want to touch" on Twitter.We revealed the relationship between the body part that people want to touch and the touch gesture.We also revealed the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the desire to touch.Specifically, we observed "skin hunger," i.e., the strong desire for physical communication, and variation of touch avoidance toward objects such as doorknobs.Our results will be beneficial for understanding human behavior as well as for the further development of haptic technology.