From Perception to Action: A Review and Taxonomy on Electrical Muscle Stimulation in HCI.

The last decade has witnessed an increase in Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) research. Myriads of application scenarios have been proposed and toolkits, as well as procedures, have been presented to the research community. While these individual explorations provide a benefit to the research community, the overarching view on the topic is still unclear which helps to understand how such technology can be used in the future. To tackle this, we conduct a systematic literature survey of research utilizing EMS as a wearable output method. We investigate the published research (N = 151) by analyzing the EMS systems’ setup, calibration, and evaluation. We create a taxonomy of the application scenarios that categorize them along two dimensions (i.e., (1) action <> perception and (2) augmentation <> induction). Further, we distill open research challenges from our results that can help to stimulate and guide research on EMS in the future.