MoodWings

Abstract

Stress has a wide range of negative impacts on people, ranging from declines in real-time task performance to development of chronic health conditions. Despite the increasing availability of sensors and methods for detecting stress, little work has focused on automated stress interventions and their effect. We present MoodWings: a wearable butterfly that mirrors a user's real-time stress state through actuated wing motion. We designed MoodWings to function both as an early-stress-warning system as well as a physical interface through which users could manipulate their affective state. Accordingly, we hypothesized that MoodWings would help users both calm down and perform better during stressful tasks. We tested our hypotheses on a common stressful task: driving. While users drove significantly more safely with MoodWings, they experienced higher stress levels (physiologically and selfperceived). Despite this, users were enthusiastic about MoodWings, expressing several alternative contexts in which they would find it useful. We discuss these results and future design implications for building externalized manifestations of real-time affective state.

Towards Affective Chronometry

“…Moving away from traditional displays, an emerging body of work has explored alternative ways to support feedback on affective data through different materials such as paper [100], ambient light [77], clothing [34,35], shape-changing surfaces [101] and haptic actuators [8,47]. We agree with Dourish and Mazmanian [19] on the importance of materiality of digital data in shaping people's interpretations.…”

“…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.…”

A Craft Approach to Health Awareness in Children

“…BreakAway [14] employed the body language of a small desktop sculpture to make people aware of their sedentary lifestyle. In a similar vein, MoodWings [19], utilized a small wearable butterfly to make users aware of their stress levels. Specifically for children, Parés' work on the Interactive Slide [33] and the Interactive Water Installation [28] highlights tangible playground designs that couple physical activity with social interaction.…”

Investigating User Needs for Bio-sensing and Affective Wearables

“…As a result, the application areas of affective [13] or biosensing wearables expand from medical monitoring to personal information applications (cf., Quantified Self 1 movement). Research has taken up on this development and focused on exploiting wearables to extract accurate information from the body's raw signals to provide value for users [1,6,8].…”