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Abstract: An 'affectivewearable' is a wearable system equipped with sensors and tools which enables recognition of its wearer's affective
patterns. Affectivepatterns include expressionsof emotion such as a joyfulsmile, an angrygesture, a strained voice or a change in autonomic
nervous system activity such as accelerated heart rate or increasing skin conductivity.This paper describes new applications of affective
wearables, and presents a prototypewhichgathersphysiologicalsignalsand their annotations fromits wearer.Resultsofpreliminaryexperiments
of its performanceare reported for a user wearing four different sensors and engagingin several natural activities.
9 Springer-VerlagLondon Ltd
Personal Technologies(1997) 1:231-240
One of the big problems in emotion theory is you laugh, or smile. By detecting these events, it
determining what physiological patterns accom- could become smarter about automatically saving
pany each emotion [3]. In some individuals, an these kinds of photos in the future. Moreover, by
increase in temperature and blood pressure might labelling the photos with these affective events,
co-occur with anger. An acceleration in heart rate you can later ask the system to retrieve data by its
and pupillary dilation might indicate the person affective qualities, 'Computer, please show us the
likes what he is looking at. However, almost all of funny images.' Of course the wearer should be free
the studies trying to determine which responses to communicate with the system at all times, which
occur with which emotions have been done on includes sometimes overriding what the system has
artificially elicited emotions in a lab setting, where learned. But, if the wearable learns continuously,
there is good reason to believe that people might by watching what the wearer chooses, it should
not feel the emotions in the same way as when help reduce some of the users workload and enable
they are more naturally elicited. This problem the wearer to offload repetitive tasks.
has held back progress in emotion understanding. We have built a prototype of an affective Wear-
A wearable allows a tremendous opportunity to Cam, based on the wearable described in the
learn about affective patterns in natural situations. next section. This prototype includes a small
Affective wearables provide a perfect opportunity camera worn as a pendant around the wearer's
to bring powerful computational methods to bear neck, together with skin conductivity sensors and
on testing emotion theories. pattern recognition software. The camera contin-
uously records and buffers images in a rotating
buffer, deleting the oldest images as the buffer fills.
Applications of Affective Simultaneously, the system uses small electrodes
Wearables to sense skin conductivity in the wearer's skin,
either across two fingers or across the arch of the
There are dozens of applications of affective foot. Pattern recognition software has been trained
computing in addition to the medical and health to recognise the wearer's 'startle response', a skin
applications mentioned above [4]. For example, conductivity pattern that occurs when the wearer
emotions are known to provide a keen index into feels startled by a surprising event. Unlike many
human memory; therefore, a computer that pays affective signals, the human startle response is fairly
232 attention to your affective state will be better at robust and easy to detect. With a matched filter
understanding what you are likely to recall on your and threshold detector, the startle pattern in the
own, and what is of interest to you. This is poten- wearer's skin conductance signal is detected in real
tially very useful in helping people deal with time. The skin conductivity response occurs with
information overload. For example, instead of a a typical latency of 3 seconds after the startling
system recording everything you hear, see, or click event. When the pattern is detected, the images
on, the system might learn to record (or play back) leading up to the startle event are extracted from
just those places where you were interested. Or, it the buffer. The buffer can be set to hold arbitrary
might play back just those places in a lecture that amounts of imagery, typically in the range of 5
you missed, perhaps because your mind wandered seconds to 3 minutes of data. When the startle is
or you were bored. Augmenting a system like Steve detected, the images extracted from the buffer can
Mann's WearCam with affective sensing and then be saved into a more permanent memory for
pattern recognition could help it learn when to your later perusal, or automatically sent back to a
'remember' the video it collects, as opposed to remote location to be analysed by a 'safety net' [5],
always relying on the user to tell it what to remem- community of friends or family with whom you
ber or forget. Of course the user can still direct felt secure, to see if the event warranted any action
what the system does; that function does not go on your behalf.
away. The goal is simply to begin to automate The StartleCam (Fig. 1) is an example where
those functions that the user typically applies, analysis of a wearer's affective patterns triggers
especially when they are predictable with affective actions in real tirae. In the future, a 'fear detector'
information. might also trigger a wearable camera to save a
Suppose, for example, that you let the Wear- wide-angle view of the environment, and with a
Cam roll in a continuously learning mode while global positioning system attachment, the wearer's
playing with a cute little child. It might notice that position, viewpoint, and fear state could all be
you always save the shots when the child makes transmitted using the wireless modem.
R. W. Picardand J. Healey