Does Encouraging Self-touching Behaviors with Supportive Voices Increase Stress-buffering Effects?

Due to the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, such measures as social distancing is being promulgated to reduce community spread. Unfortunately, such steps greatly limit physical touching, and this touch starvation increases people's stress. We address this problem by focusing on touch interactions with oneself: self-touch. We developed a system that consists of a touch sensor and a supportive voice function to encourage self-touch behaviors. We experimentally evaluated whether our developed system increased self-touch behaviors and investigated its stress-buffering effects under stressful settings. The experimental results showed that the system increased self-touch behaviors, although only male participants showed significant stress-buffering effects.