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Hand-to-Face transmission has been estimated to be a minority, yet non-negligible, vector of COVID-19 transmission and a major vector for multiple other pathogens. At the same time, as it cannot be effectively addressed with mainstream protection measures, such as wearing masks or tracing contacts, it remains largely untackled. To help address this issue, we have developed Saving Face - an app that alerts users when they are about to touch their faces, by analyzing the distortion patterns in the ultrasound signal emitted by their earphones. The system only relies on pre-existing hardware (a smartphone with generic earphones), which allows it to be rapidly scalable to billions of smartphone users worldwide. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of the system, as well as the results of a user study testing the solution's accuracy, robustness, and user experience during various day-to-day activities (93.7% Sensitivity and 91.5% Precision, N=10). While this paper focuses on the system's application to detecting hand-to-face gestures, the technique can also be applicable to other types of gestures and gesture-based applications.

Enhancing the empathy of our human interactions has been the object of intensive psychological studies for decades. The emergence of affective computing has opened the door towards technologically-enabled solutions. Yet, existing techniques struggle to attain their desired impact, often being difficult and expensive to deliver, and disconnected from daily life. Project Us' goal is to help overcome these challenges through a pair of wearable devices (in this case wristbands) that aim to trigger an empathy-enhancing effect, when being worn by two people during day-to-day conversations. The small-sized, wireless devices sense each person's electrodermal activity, associated with their level of emotional arousal, and share it to the other partner (when a threshold is exceeded) through a discreet, haptic nudge, creating a real-time feedback loop. The user study performed with 18 participants (nine romantically engaged couples) revealed that most of them found the wristbands to increase their level of awareness of the partner's emotional experience. Their interaction was analyzed based on interviews (qualitatively), and natural language processing techniques (quantitatively).

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