Hand Dominance and Congruence for Wrist-Worn Haptics Using Custom Voice-Coil Actuation

During virtual interactions, rendering haptic feedback on a remote location (like the wrist) instead of the fingertips frees users' hands from mechanical devices. This allows for real interactions while still providing information about the mechanical properties of virtual objects. In this letter, we investigate the impact of using the dominant or non-dominant hand for virtual interactions and the best mapping between the active hand and the wrist receiving the haptic feedback, which can be defined as hand-wrist congruence through a user experiment based on a stiffness discrimination task. To render force feedback, we present CoWrHap – a novel wrist-worn haptic device with custom-made voice coil actuation. Our results show that participants performed the tasks
(i)
better with non-congruent mapping but reported better experiences with congruent mapping, and
(ii)
with no statistical difference in terms of hand dominance but with better user experience (enjoyment, pleasantness, etc.) using their dominant hands.