how to design, build, and use interactive electrical stimulation

at CHI 2025

April 29 (tue), 9AM, 2025

Register (sold out!)

Interested in a kit!

Course description

Electrical stimulation is now becoming one of key approaches to create haptic sensations in interactive experiences. The recent rise of this approach has allowed many HCI researchers to push haptics into more and more domains, include when devices need to be small, portable or even wearable. At its core, all these techniques share one underlying principle from neuroscience: they act on the users’ nervous system to create sensations electrically. As such, using these techniques requires not only to get hands-on experience with hardware, but also learn the fundamental principles, safety, and their possibilities and limitations.

What you will learn

Assisted by us, you will build your own simple interactive experiences based on electrical stimulation—facilitated by our toolkit and its Python API. The goal is that participants will, safely, test their ideas using electrical stimulation of their body. We will provide electrical stimulators for the participants to use during the course, along with software libraries.

Schedule: April 29 (tue) from 9:00 to 10:30; coffee break; 11:10 to 12:40 (all times are local conference time).
Registration: Sign up for the course via CHI 2025 registration page
Questions: click to send email to yudaitanaka@uchicago.edu

Interested in a stimulation kit?

If you'd like to eventually get access to a stimulation toolkit (hardware and software) or the materials to make your own. Please register your interest. We will update you once we have produced new kits and/or are able to release the files to the community.

Organizers

Yudai Tanaka
University of Chicago
Pedro Lopes
University of Chicago

Contributors

Lonnie Chien
Lonnie Chien
Lorenzo Kwenda
Lorenzo Kwenda

Supported by

Sony Research Award Program