Reimagining Touch in Digital Contexts: A Participatory Approach to Embodied Remote Care
by Greta Gauhe
Touch is fundamental to human experience, essential for emotional well-being, sensory integration, and physical health. Yet for many, including people with chronic pain, those living in social isolation, and young people with diverse sensory needs, in-person touch is increasingly inaccessible. While remote healthcare has rapidly expanded, little attention has been paid to the embodied, felt experience of touch in digital contexts. Existing haptic technologies often prioritise the simulation of physical touch through devices, yet tend to overlook its subjective and imaginative qualities.
My practice-based PhD addresses this gap through the development of co-created, remote, touch-based practice grounded in participatory action research, and practice-as-research. The work offers creative methods to help people engage with their sense of touch through guided audio experiences designed collaboratively with participants and artist-collaborators.
The research began with a systematic literature review on how touch-based disciplines like manual therapy adapted to remote delivery during COVID-19. I also conducted expert interviews with artists pioneering multi-sensory performance practices, identifying the contributions of creative work to embodied remote engagement.
The core research evolved through three artistic projects:
- Be(in)g touch
- Until We Meet
- Movement Snack (co-created with people living with chronic pain)
In each project, I used guided audio-recordings to invite participants into sensory and imaginative experiences of touch, using somatic prompts and active invitations to explore different forms of tactile engagement, including self-touch and interactions with their immediate surroundings.
In the site-specific outdoor performance Until We Meet, participants encountered QR codes placed around a park in London. Each code linked to a unique audio recording that encouraged them to engage with their sense of touch in a public outdoor space. These recordings were co-created in collaboration with a group of long-term artist partners, aiming for an approach that foregrounded the subjective and relational dimensions of touch.
In Movement Snacks for people with chronic pain, I worked with both artist collaborators and individuals with lived experience of chronic pain to co-create a new series of audio-recordings. In the final stage of this project, two participants contributed their own audio-recordings, which were shared on the project website as a continuation of the co-creative process. Feedback gathered through surveys, interviews, and focus groups revealed a range of benefits, including increased body awareness, improved relaxation, and support with pain management.
By focusing on the embodied, felt experiences of remote touch, this research presents a co-creative approach to digital health and care. It offers participant-led strategies for engagement that can be adapted and extended across artistic, healthcare, and educational settings, emphasising collaboration, accessibility, and the value of lived experience.
Co-creation was a central method throughout my research, used to collaboratively develop touch-focused audio-recordings across several projects.
In the early projects, I worked closely with artist-collaborators to develop and refine sensory audio experiences, such as Be(in)g Touch (indoor sensory touch recordings) and Until We Meet (outdoor audio experiences).
Collaboration took place primarily online through Zoom meetings for discussions, a WhatsApp group for ongoing communication and feedback, and an online MURAL board (via Canvas platform) that served as a shared digital workspace.
The MURAL allowed us to organise references, share readings, exchange feedback, and track each collaborator’s creative process. This multi-platform approach supported sustained collaboration despite geographical distances.
In a later project ‘Movement snack for people with chronic pain’ involving people living with chronic pain, co-creation expanded to include direct participation from research participants in shaping new audio-recordings. Over several months, participants took part in regular online meetings where they listened to existing recordings and provided detailed feedback, influencing both the content and presentation. For example, participants stressed the importance of clear instructions about which body parts to engage to avoid discomfort, and suggested content warnings on the project website. They also contributed creative responses to a shared online whiteboard, which allowed them to express their experiences through non-written formats. This not only provided a way to capture diverse modes of feedback but also enabled participants to share and connect with others’ experiences within the group, creating a sense of community and mutual support.
In the final phase, participants were invited to create their own audio-recordings. This began with a group meeting introducing the creative strategies used in the project to help guide their contributions.
Communication continued through a dedicated WhatsApp group, providing a flexible space for sharing reflections, drafts, and feedback. This method allowed participants to engage at their own pace and accommodate the unpredictable nature of chronic pain.
Overall, co-creation functioned both as a practical approach for collaboratively developing material and as a way to gradually shift creative agency toward participants. By enabling them to be both contributors and creators, this method fostered shared authorship rooted in participants’ lived experiences.
References:
Gauhe G. Artistic methods for remote touch: A practice-based research with audio recordings (2025). Choreographic Practices Journal, Volume 15
Gauhe G. Artist’s perspectives and creative methods for online multi-sensory performances during and after COVID-19: a qualitative interview study (2024) International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 1–25
Gauhe G, Cisneros R, Ward J, Hohenschurz-Schmidt D. Suddenly hands-off: A thematic synthesis of qualitative studies of creatively adapted touch-based practices to suit the online format in the context of COVID-19 (2023) J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e46355
David Hohenschurz-Schmidt, Jules Phalip, Jessica Chan, Greta Gauhe, Nadia Soliman, Jan Vollert, Sigrid Juhl Lunde, Lene Vase. Placebo Analgesia in Physical and Psychological Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Three-Armed Trials (2023) European Journal of Pain.
