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Research in the Tent

This year, the Center for Humans and Technology is contributing to Lowlands Science. At the festival, a container will be transformed into a research space for the project Hold Tight!, part of the broader initiative Dutch Touch. Here, the Dutch Touch Society鈥攁 network of universities and research institutes鈥攊nvestigates how social and affective touch influences stress. From the Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Antal Haans is involved. As a researcher in the Human-Technology Interaction group, he studies social touch and how technology can enable remote tactile interaction.

Overlooked Sense

In the experiment, visitors watch a suspenseful film while holding hands with a friend, a stranger, or cradling a soft robot. The 4D experience includes scent, sound, light, and vibration to intensify immersion. Researchers measure skin conductance to assess how human or robotic touch affects stress responses. Haans emphasizes that touch is a sense often overlooked in engineering, despite its fundamental role in how people experience safety and connection. 鈥淲e鈥檙e especially interested in whether those feelings emerge when strangers touch, or when a human is replaced by a robot.鈥�

Touch is not just clinical

The findings are relevant to current societal challenges, such as loneliness among older adults, stress in young people, and the lack of physical closeness in digital communication. In healthcare, touch鈥攐r a technological substitute鈥攃an offer comfort and support. By conducting the experiment at a festival, researchers make the topic accessible to a broad audience and demonstrate that touch is not just clinical鈥攊t鈥檚 part of everyday life.

Lowlands is a special place to do this research. The audience is open and curious, but the setting is also quite demanding for a researcher. It means three long days of work, from afternoon until late at night. I probably won鈥檛 see much of the music lineup鈥攗nless the bass shakes the container during a measurement :-).

Antal Haans

Collaboration

Hold Tight! is a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Twente, University of Amsterdam, and Utrecht University, Tilburg University, University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, and TNO. This partnership operates within the Dutch Touch Society, a network of researchers from various disciplines focused on social and affective touch; combining their expertise to explore how physical and technological touch contributes to well-being, communication, and connection. Lowlands offers a unique opportunity to bring science and society closer together.