License to chill!

Abstract

There exists today a paucity of tools and devices that empower people to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. To overcome this deficit, we are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health by enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities and their own memories and subjective experiences. This construction is based upon values detected from certain bodily reactions that are then visualized on a mobile phone. Accomplishing this entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making the individual even more stressed, while also making certain that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. Useful design feedback was derived from testing two different visualizations on the mobile in a Wizard of Oz study. In short, we found that a successful design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short-term history, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not increase our participants stress reactions.

Towards Affective Chronometry

“…Over the last decade, there has been a growing HCI interest in designing technologies that provide affective feedback. These include biofeedback systems for well-being [22,47], self-awareness, reflection [50,78], and emotion regulation [8,51], as well as mindfulness practices [10,85]. For instance, AffectAura [50] is a timeline-based interactive interface that represents affect through bubbles, allowing users to reflect on everyday emotional experiences.…”

“…Such work aims to support increased self-awareness by providing interactive feedback mirroring physiological signals. Previous work on affective designs has focused on time-series graphs [33,103,108] and abstract visualizations [22,26,41,78,99,102] of biosignals on traditional mobile and desktop interfaces.…”

“…Unlike the predominant focus on screenbased light emitting affective displays, we explored alternative materials in raw form such as thermochromic ones, heating elements, shape memory alloys, and vibrotactile actuators. Although both arousal and valence are important dimensions of affect [64], most wearable biosensors capture arousal [22,35,47,56,67,88] because of sensor's increased wearability and less invasive nature. This paper aims to explore the feasibility of smart materials and actuators to represent real-time arousal in everyday contexts through metaphors such as arousal is red, arousal is (haptic) intensity, arousal is heat, and how they shape people's subjective interpretations of their emotions.…”

Mind the body!

“…Our tests were a mix of Lo-Fi testing [37], fake scenarios in a Wizard of Oz-fashion [11], testing the system on ourselves using an autobiographical design method [29], and making end-users wear the system for a limited time. While testing the system on ourselves may seem unorthodox, it was sometimes the only way we could access relevant data on users' experiences [ibid.].…”

“…And what if providing real-time feedback would make our users even more stressed? In a Wizard of Oz study, testing two different visualizations on the mobile shown in Figure 3, we got some useful design feedback [11].…”