Research in the use of ubiquitous technologies, tracking systems and wearables within
mental health domains is on the rise. In recent years, affective technologies have gained
traction and garnered the interest of interdisciplinary fields as the research on such technologies
matured. However, while the role of movement and bodily experience to affective experience is
well-established, how to best address movement and engagement beyond measuring cues and signals
in technology-driven interactions has been unclear. In a joint industry-academia effort, we aim to
remodel how affective technologies can help address body and emotional self-awareness. We present
an overview of biosignals that have become standard in low-cost physiological monitoring and show
how these can be matched with methods and engagements used by interaction designers skilled in
designing for bodily engagement and aesthetic experiences. Taking both strands of work together offers
unprecedented design opportunities that inspire further research. Through first-person soma design,
an approach that draws upon the designer’s felt experience and puts the sentient body at the forefront,
we outline a comprehensive work for the creation of novel interactions in the form of couplings that
combine biosensing and body feedback modalities of relevance to affective health. These couplings lie
within the creation of design toolkits that have the potential to render rich embodied interactions to
the designer/user. As a result we introduce the concept of “orchestration”. By orchestration, we refer
to the design of the overall interaction: coupling sensors to actuation of relevance to the affective
experience; initiating and closing the interaction; habituating; helping improve on the users’ body
awareness and engagement with emotional experiences; soothing, calming, or energising, depending
on the affective health condition and the intentions of the designer. Through the creation of a
range of prototypes and couplings we elicited requirements on broader orchestration mechanisms.
First-person soma design lets researchers look afresh at biosignals that, when experienced through
the body, are called to reshape affective technologies with novel ways to interpret biodata, feel it,
understand it and reflect upon our bodies