HapLand: A Scalable Robust Emotion Regulation Haptic System Testbed

Emotion regulation is crucial for healthy adaptation, while emotion dysregulation can lead to the development of mental health disorders such as anxiety or depression. Everyone, one way or another, sometimes fails to effectively regulate their emotions, making this a challenging problem with broad potential impact. In our research, we are exploring three ways in which haptics-enabled wearables can facilitate effective emotion regulation, formulated based on Gross's model of emotion regulation. We hypothesize that an individual-level biofeedback haptic could foster healthier and more effective patterns of emotion regulation. We have designed and implemented HapLand, a scalable, robust biofeedback haptic system testbed to facilitate research-based haptics-enabled wearables design for the purpose of emotion regulation. In this paper, we give an overview of HapLand and our plans for using HapLand for future research.