The housing 1672 is a rigid casing that encloses and protects the cutaneous actuator 1602 and electronic circuitry 1608 (not shown in FIG. 16M) that is connected to and drives the cutaneous actuator 1602. The housing 1672 may be in the shape of a cylinder, a cone, a cube, a prism, etc. The cutaneous actuator 1602 is completely located within the housing 1672 to generate haptic vibrations 1616 corresponding to actuator signals received by the cutaneous actuator 1602. The actuator signals may be generated by various methods as described with respect to FIGS. 9F, 14A, 14C, 17A, and 18A. The haptic vibrations 1616 communicate haptic output (e.g., words in a haptic lexicon) to a body 1618 of a user via the skin when the user is wearing the haptic communication device 1670. The communication of the haptic output may be performed by various methods as described with respect to FIGS. 8C, 9A, 10E, 15B, and 15C. As described above with respect to FIG. 1, the cutaneous actuator 1602 may be a voice coil, a linear resonant actuator (LRA), an eccentric rotating mass actuator, a piezoelectric actuator, an electroactive polymer actuator, a shape memory alloy actuator, a pneumatic actuator, a microfluidic actuator, or an acoustic metasurface actuator.
