The HapBand: A Cutaneous Device for Remote Tactile Interaction Francesco Chinello 1 , Mirko Aurilio 1 , Claudio Pacchierotti 1,2 , and Domenico Prattichizzo 1,2 1 Dept. of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, Siena, Italy 2 Dept. of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy {chinello,aurilio,pacchierotti,prattichizzo}@dii.unisi.it Abstract. In this work we present a novel haptic device that applies cutaneous force feedback to the forearm. We called it HapBand. It is composed of three moving plates, whose action on the forearm resem- bles the squeeze of a human hand. In order to validate the device, we carried out an experiment of remote tactile interaction. A glove, instru- mented with five force sensors, registered the contact forces at the remote site, while the HapBand mimicked the registered sensation to the user’s forearm. Results showed the HapBand to well resemble the squeezing sensation on the forearm. Keywords: cutaneous feedback, affective haptics, remote tactile interaction 1 Introduction Haptic force feedback has been effectively used in teleoperation to sense objects at a distance. An instrumented slave robot records the contact interactions with the remote environment, and a haptic interface provides this information to the human operator. Haptic feedback has been proved to play an important role in enhancing teleoperation performance in terms of task completion time [1,2,3], accuracy [1,4,5], peak [6,7], and mean exerted force [2,7]. More recently, haptic force has been also employed to transmit haptic sen- sations between humans. Instead of registering remote interactions using a slave robot, another human user, through some kind of instrumented garment, inter- acts with the remote environment and sends this information back to the master operator. Prattichizzo et al. [8] presented a system, called RemoTouch, to share haptic sensations between humans. They employed an instrumented glove to sense forces at the remote environment and a 2-DoF wearable cutaneous device to feed back those forces at the master side. The wearable device they used has been developed by Minamizawa et al. [9] for simulating weight sensations of vir- tual objects. It consists of two motors and a belt able to deform the fingertip. When motors spin in opposite directions, the belt applies a force perpendicular to the user’s fingertip, while when motors spin in the same direction, the belt