Project Us: A Wearable for Enhancing Empathy
Name
3393914.3395882.pdf
Size
2.03 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
19b08fdb740919393e38effed69ccf4a
Author(s)
Rojas, Camilo
Corral, Malena
Poulsen, Niels
Maes, Patricia
Date Issued
July 2020
Journal
DIS 2020 Companion - Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Rojas, Camilo, Corral, Malena, Poulsen, Niels and Maes, Pattie. 2020. "Project Us: A Wearable for Enhancing Empathy." DIS 2020 Companion - Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 Owner/Author. 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).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395882
