Camilo Rojas
ABSTRACT
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).
- Firoj Alam, Morena Danieli, and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2018. Annotating and modeling empathy in spoken conversations. Computer Speech & Language 50 (2018), 40 -- 61.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Paige Greason Bentley, Sebastian G Kaplan, and Josephine Mokonogho. 2018. Relational mindfulness for psychiatry residents: a pilot course in empathy development and burnout prevention. Academic Psychiatry 42, 5 (2018), 668--673.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Philippe Bertrand, Jérôme Guegan, Léonore Robieux, Cade Andrew McCall, and Franck Zenasni. 2018. Learning empathy through virtual reality: multiple strategies for training empathy-related abilities using body ownership illusions in embodied virtual reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 5 (2018), 26.Google ScholarCross Ref
- BITalino. 2020. Biomedical Equipment | Low-Cost Toolkit. (2020). https://bitalino.com/en/Google Scholar
- Wolfram Boucsein. 2012. Electrodermal activity. Springer Science & Business Media.Google Scholar
- Jason J Braithwaite, Derrick G Watson, Robert Jones, and Mickey Rowe. 2013. A guide for analysing electrodermal activity (EDA) & skin conductance responses (SCRs) for psychological experiments. Psychophysiology 49, 1 (2013).Google Scholar
- Shiri Cohen, Marc S Schulz, Emily Weiss, and Robert J Waldinger. 2012. Eye of the beholder: The individual and dyadic contributions of empathic accuracy and perceived empathic effort to relationship satisfaction. Journal of Family Psychology 26, 2 (2012), 236.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Duncan Cramer and Sophia Jowett. 2010. Perceived empathy, accurate empathy and relationship satisfaction in heterosexual couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, 3 (2010), 327--349.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Max T Curran, Jeremy Raboff Gordon, Lily Lin, Priyashri Kamlesh Sridhar, and John Chuang. 2019. Understanding Digitally-Mediated Empathy: An Exploration of Visual, Narrative, and Biosensory Informational Cues. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--13.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Frederique De Vignemont and Tania Singer. 2006. The empathic brain: how, when and why? Trends in cognitive sciences 10, 10 (2006), 435--441.Google Scholar
- J.C.F. de Winter. 2013. Using the Student's t-test with extremely small sample sizes. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation 18 (2013).Google Scholar
- Yang-Teng Fan, Chenyi Chen, Shih-Chuan Chen, Jean Decety, and Yawei Cheng. 2014. Empathic arousal and social understanding in individuals with autism: evidence from fMRI and ERP measurements. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 9, 8 (2014), 1203--1213.Google Scholar
- Renaud Gervais, Jérémy Frey, Alexis Gay, Fabien Lotte, and Martin Hachet. 2016. Tobe: Tangible out-of-body experience. In Proceedings of the TEI'16: Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. 227--235.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Javier Hernandez, Rob R Morris, and Rosalind W Picard. 2011. Call center stress recognition with person-specific models. In International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. Springer, 125--134.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Texas Instruments. 2020. DRV2605 Haptic Driver for ERM and LRA With Built-In Library and Smart-Loop Architecture. (2020). http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/ symlink/drv2605.pdf?ts=1588711376268Google Scholar
- Steven C Kassel and John LeMay. 2015. Interpersonal biofeedback: Biofeedback in a relationship context. Biofeedback 43, 4 (2015), 153--157.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ewa Lux, Marc TP Adam, Verena Dorner, Sina Helming, Michael T Knierim, and Christof Weinhardt. 2018. Live biofeedback as a user interface design element: A review of the literature. Communications of the Association for Information Systems 43, 1 (2018),Google Scholar
- [18] John Muñoz, Afonso Gonçalves, T Vieira, D Cró, Yoram Chisik, and Sergi Bermúdez i Badia. 2016. Space Connection - A Multiplayer Collaborative Biofeedback Game To Promote Empathy In Teenagers: A Feasibility Study.Google Scholar
- Richard V Palumbo, Marisa E Marraccini, Lisa L Weyandt, Oliver Wilder-Smith, Heather A McGee, Siwei Liu, and Matthew S Goodwin. 2017. Interpersonal autonomic physiology: A systematic review of the literature. Personality and Social Psychology Review 21, 2 (2017), 99--141.Google ScholarCross Ref
- James W Pennebaker, Roger J Booth, and Martha E Francis. 2007. Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC [Computer software]. Austin, TX: liwc. net 135 (2007).Google Scholar
- Raspberry Pi. 2020. About the Raspberry Pi Zero W. (2020). https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/ raspberry-pi-zero-w/Google Scholar
- Helen Riess, John M Kelley, Robert W Bailey, Emily J Dunn, and Margot Phillips. 2012. Empathy training for resident physicians: a randomized controlled trial of a neuroscience-informed curriculum. Journal of general internal medicine 27, 10 (2012), 1280--1286.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Felix Schoeller, Philippe Bertrand, Lynda Joy Gerry, Abhinandan Jain, Adam Haar Horowitz, and Franck Zenasni. 2019. Combining Virtual Reality and Biofeedback to Foster Empathic Abilities in Humans. Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2019), 2741. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/ fpsyg.2018.02741Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cornelia Setz, Bert Arnrich, Johannes Schumm, Roberto La Marca, Gerhard Tröster, and Ulrike Ehlert. 2009. Discriminating stress from cognitive load using a wearable EDA device. IEEE Transactions on information technology in biomedicine 14, 2 (2009), 410--417.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tania Singer and Claus Lamm. 2009. The social neuroscience of empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1156, 1 (2009), 81--96.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mel Slater and Maria V Sanchez-Vives. 2016. Enhancing our lives with immersive virtual reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3 (2016), 74.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sara Taylor, Natasha Jaques, Weixuan Chen, Szymon Fedor, Akane Sano, and Rosalind Picard. 2015. Automatic identification of artifacts in electrodermal activity data. In 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC). IEEE, 1934--1937.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M Alex Wagaman, Jennifer M Geiger, Clara Shockley, and Elizabeth A Segal. 2015. The role of empathy in burnout, compassion satisfaction, and secondary traumatic stress among social workers. Social work 60, 3 (2015), 201--209.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Project Us: A Wearable for Enhancing Empathy
Recommendations
TellTale: Adding a Polygraph to Everyday Life
CHI EA '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsTellTale is a wearable device that seeks to augment communication with subconscious emotion information. By sensing a user's heart rate and galvanic response, two major biological indicators of physiological state, TellTale can provide insight into true ...
Consumer Wearables and Affective Computing for Wellbeing Support
MobiQuitous '20: MobiQuitous 2020 - 17th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and ServicesWearables equipped with pervasive sensors enable us to monitor physiological and behavioral signals in our everyday life. We propose the WellAff system able to recognize affective states for wellbeing support. It also includes health care scenarios, in ...
The Effect of Different Affective Arousal Levels on Taste Perception
ICMI '20 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal InteractionThe emotions we experience shape our perception, and our emotion is shaped by our perceptions. Taste perception is also influenced by emotions. Positive and negative emotions alter sweetness, sourness, and bitterness perception. However, most previous ...
Comments