Tactile Facial Expressions and Associated Emotions toward Accessible Social Interactions for Individuals Who Are Blind

For individuals who are blind, much of social interactions are inaccessible: The majority of information exchanged is non-verbal, e.g., facial expressions and body language. Little work has been done toward building social assistive aids for individuals who are blind. This work presents a mapping between facial action units and vibrotactile representations that may be presented through haptic displays. We present a study exploring how well individuals who are blind can learn to recognize universal emotions of happy, sad, surprise, anger, fear and disgust from vibrotactile facial action units. Results show promising recognition accuracy and subjective feedback, demonstrating that individuals who are blind can learn to understand the emotional content of facial movements presented through vibrations.