License to chill!: how to empower users to cope with stress

There exists today a paucity of tools and devices that empower people to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. To overcome this deficit, we are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health by enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities and their own memories and subjective experiences. This construction is based upon values detected from certain bodily reactions that are then visualized on a mobile phone. Accomplishing this entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making the individual even more stressed, while also making certain that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. Useful design feedback was derived from testing two different visualizations on the mobile in a Wizard of Oz study. In short, we found that a successful design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short-term history, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not increase our participants stress reactions

Unveiling Emotions: Attitudes Toward Affective Technology

With its ability to sense and/or generate human emotions, affective computing calls for a new generation of technology. This study brings affective technologies into focus which can sense human emotions. Compared to other types of technology, affective technologies have distinct characteristics—anthropomorphism, uncontrollability, capturing of highly sensitive data, unfamiliarity, and complexity—with fundamental effects on the interaction with humans. These characteristics of affective technology create a feeling of uncertainty about how such a system works. However, the attitudes people exhibit toward the usage, notably trust, such as affective assistance systems has received only scant attention. Hence, we define attitudes toward affective technology and contribute to the literature by proposing a research model that we analyzed using a quantitative methodology with 303 participants. From the theoretical model, we derive implications for theory, practice, and design

Approaches, applications, and challenges in physiological emotion recognition — a tutorial overview

An automatic emotion recognition system can serve as a fundamental framework for various applications in daily life from monitoring emotional well-being to improving the quality of life through better emotion regulation. Understanding the process of emotion manifestation becomes crucial for building emotion recognition systems. An emotional experience results in changes not only in interpersonal behavior but also in physiological responses. Physiological signals are one of the most reliable means for recognizing emotions since individuals cannot consciously manipulate them for a long duration. These signals can be captured by medical-grade wearable devices, as well as commercial smart watches and smart bands. With the shift in research direction from laboratory to unrestricted daily life, commercial devices have been employed ubiquitously. However, this shift has introduced several challenges, such as low data quality, dependency on subjective self-reports, unlimited movement-related changes, and artifacts in physiological signals. This tutorial provides an overview of practical aspects of emotion recognition, such as experiment design, properties of different physiological modalities, existing datasets, suitable machine learning algorithms for physiological data, and several applications. It aims to provide the necessary psychological and physiological backgrounds through various emotion theories and the physiological manifestation of emotions, thereby laying a foundation for emotion recognition. Finally, the tutorial discusses open research directions and possible solutions

Proactive Privacy Practices In The Trend Of Ubiquitous Services: An Integrative Social Contracts Perspective

Privacy is a strategic issue that deserves great attention from enterprises because the convergence of customer information and advanced technologies that they engage in diverse business processes in response to competitive pressure, particularly when businesses promote their traditional e-services to ubiquitous services (u-services). The underlying vision of u-services is to overcome spatial and temporal boundaries in traditional services, such as m-services and e-services. U-services will be the next wave and can be recognized as a logical extension of traditional e-services because u-services are initiated by e-services based on current potential customer pool and further propagated by m-services. In the context of u-services, customers are always connected seamlessly in context-awareness networks so that a higher degree of customized and personalized services can be timely provided. While people are served with more convenience and efficiency, they may also well be aware of privacy threats behind that. Hence, privacy concerns have been recognized as a critical impediment for boosting u-services. Drawing upon integrative social contracts theory, this study undertakes to explore a proactive privacy practices framework that embraces technical and non-technical elements such as human, legal, and economic relevant perspectives. The results of this study are expected to shed light on privacy practices

Adversarial uses of affective computing and ethical implications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Page 158 blank.Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-145).Much existing affective computing research focuses on systems designed to use information related to emotion to benefit users. Many technologies are used in situations their designers didn't anticipate and would not have intended. This thesis discusses several adversarial uses of affective computing: use of systems with the goal of hindering some users. The approach taken is twofold: first experimental observation of use of systems that collect affective signals and transmit them to an adversary; second discussion of normative ethical judgments regarding adversarial uses of these same systems. This thesis examines three adversarial contexts: the Quiz Experiment, the Interview Experiment, and the Poker Experiment. In the quiz experiment, participants perform a tedious task that allows increasing their monetary reward by reporting they solved more problems than they actually did. The Interview Experiment centers on a job interview where some participants hide or distort information, interviewers are rewarded for hiring the honest, and where interviewees are rewarded for being hired. In the Poker Experiment subjects are asked to play a simple poker-like game against an adversary who has extra affective or game state information.(cont.) These experiments extend existing work on ethical implications of polygraphs by considering variables (e.g. context or power relationships) other than recognition rate and using systems where information is completely mediated by computers. In all three experiments it is hypothesized that participants using systems that sense and transmit affective information to an adversary will have degraded performance and significantly different ethical evaluations than those using comparable systems that do not sense or transmit affective information. Analysis of the results of these experiments shows a complex situation in which the context of using affective computing systems bears heavily on reports dealing with ethical implications. The contribution of this thesis is these novel experiments that solicit participant opinion about ethical implications of actual affective computing systems and dimensional metaethics, a procedure for anticipating ethical problems with affective computing systems.by Carson Jonathan Reynolds.Ph.D

PRIMA — Privacy research through the perspective of a multidisciplinary mash up

Based on a summary description of privacy protection research within three fields of inquiry, viz. social sciences, legal science, and computer and systems sciences, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches with regard to the difficulties and the risks that they entail as well as their possible advantages. The latter include the identification of relevant perspectives of privacy, increased expressiveness in the formulation of research goals, opportunities for improved research methods, and a boost in the utility of invested research efforts

Digital behavioral technology, vulnerability and justice:towards an integrated approach

The paper introduces the notion of 'digital behavioral technologies' and discusses them from the perspectives of vulnerability and justice, thereby integrating perspectives from bioethics or public health ethics and political philosophy. Digital behavioral technologies have seen a massive uptake in recent years, but the market for them is hardly regulated. We argue that understanding the impact of digital behavioral technologies requires understanding individuals not as abstract, atomized agents, but rather to take their embeddedness into social structures into account. This also allows extending the focus to groups, relationships and whole societies, which are often structurally unjust. This perspective provides a corrective to an overly individualistic consideration of digital behavioral technologies, which may suggest itself because of their focus on individual bodies. We point out some implications of this integrated approach with regard to the regulation of digital behavioral technologies. We conclude by describing some implications both for those who work on digital behavioral technologies and for those who work on questions of vulnerability and justice

Going one step further: towards cognitively enhanced problem-solving teaming agents

Operating current advanced production systems, including Cyber-Physical Systems, often requires profound programming skills and configuration knowledge, creating a disconnect between human cognition and system operations. To address this, we suggest developing cognitive algorithms that can simulate and anticipate teaming partners' cognitive processes, enhancing and smoothing collaboration in problem-solving processes. Our proposed solution entails creating a cognitive system that minimizes human cognitive load and stress by developing models reflecting humans individual problem-solving capabilities and potential cognitive states. Further, we aim to devise algorithms that simulate individual decision processes and virtual bargaining procedures that anticipate actions, adjusting the system’s behavior towards efficient goal-oriented outcomes. Future steps include the development of benchmark sets tailored for specific use cases and human-system interactions. We plan to refine and test algorithms for detecting and inferring cognitive states of human partners. This process requires incorporating theoretical approaches and adapting existing algorithms to simulate and predict human cognitive processes of problem-solving with regards to cognitive states. The objective is to develop cognitive and computational models that enable production systems to become equal team members alongside humans in diverse scenarios, paving the way for more efficient, effective goal-oriented solutions

Fused Spectatorship: Designing Bodily Experiences Where Spectators Become Players

Spectating digital games can be exciting. However, due to its vicarious nature, spectators often wish to engage in the gameplay beyond just watching and cheering. To blur the boundaries between spectators and players, we propose a novel approach called ''Fused Spectatorship'', where spectators watch their hands play games by loaning bodily control to a computational Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) system. To showcase this concept, we designed three games where spectators loan control over both their hands to the EMS system and watch them play these competitive and collaborative games. A study with 12 participants suggested that participants could not distinguish if they were watching their hands play, or if they were playing the games themselves. We used our results to articulate four spectator experience themes and four fused spectator types, the behaviours they elicited and offer one design consideration to support each of these behaviours. We also discuss the ethical design considerations of our approach to help game designers create future fused spectatorship experiences.Comment: This paper is going to be published at Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) 202