Generating a Research Keyword Structure on Human Haptic Interaction using a Social Network Analysis Tool

The field of haptic interaction is inherently multidisciplinary and adopts knowledge from many areas, including robotics, experimental psychology, biology, computer science, systems and control, and others. It is an important first step in research reviewing overall areas of haptic related researches, as well as reviewing the specific area of focus. For this purpose, it is important to ensure objective research direction based on the clear and enlightening analysis of the research trends in this field. This study aims to identify the rela-tionship among overall areas of haptic related researches using a network analysis technique. We collected keywords of haptic related researches from several journals and used those as an input for conducting network analysis. Then, we also classified the areas of haptic researches by analyzing the relationship among keywords. From the network analysis, we found that haptic related researches could be classified into two areas; (1) Technology perspectives related to the application of haptic technology and (2) User perspectives related to the perception of haptic sensation. The keyword structure generated from this study is expected to provide basic knowledge on the trend and current status of researches in human haptic inter-action.