Project: 
Affective Health
Abstract: 
To deal with stress, in a positive way, one can benefit from increased self-reflection in order to better understand the individual experiences and how they affect your health and well-being. This way the person can become increasingly empowered over him/herself yourself. There is a lack of tools and devices to support people to be empowered to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. We are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health, enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities, as reflected by a representation on the mobile phone (which is constructed from values picked up, by biosensors, from some of their bodily reactions) and their own memories and subjective experiences. This issue entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making them even more stressed and making sure that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. In a Wizard of Oz study, testing two different visualizations on the mobile, we got some useful design feedback. In short, we found that the design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short term history, allow for scrolling back into the past, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not, according to their feedback, increase our participants stress reactions. They also claimed that the setting was successful in recreating a real-life “feeling”.
Authors: 
Ferreira, P.
Published in: 
Master Thesis. Departement of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University/KTH
Date: 
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - 00:00