Embodied Affect Regulation focusing on Heart Rate with Electrotactile Feedback
Supervisor: Dr. Patrizia Di Campli San Vito
School: Computing Science
Description:
Anxiety and stress affect the lives of the vast majority of people nowadays, leading to anxiety disorders being the most common mental health disorder worldwide (WHO). As such, research on support in stressful situations has been increasing. One strand is focusing on “embodied affect”, which investigates the influence of haptic feedback - feedback you can feel - on the physical body or the representation of physiological aspects as haptic feedback. Commonly, heart beat is used to either inform the user about their inner state to help them understand and reflect on their reactions, or present a mismatched heart rate to regulate the user’s heart rate through adaption to the haptic heart beat presentation.
Work in this area has mostly used vibration on different body locations, as vibration is an easily available and well known haptic modality. However, electrotactile feedback, where a light electrical current is sent into the skin to elicit a tingling or pulsing sensation, has been gaining in popularity due to its more diverse and flexible nature compared to vibration. Electrotactile cues can be used with self-adhesive electrodes, which allow easy placement anywhere on the user’s body, and adjustment of parameters of the electrical current can lead to a multitude of different sensations. Yet its potential for embodied affect regulation has not been explored so far.
This project will, therefore, investigate the effect of electrotactile feedback on heart rate and emotion to assess its suitability for embodied affect regulation. We will compare methods used in previous research and adapt them for electrotactile feedback and investigate the influence in affect based on changes in heart rate, self-reported anxiety levels and visual emotion detection. We will explore scenarios of differing stress levels to ensure the effects are stable.
Project Timeline:
- Weeks 1-2: Review literature in haptic embodied affect regulation and emotion recognition
- Weeks 3-5: Design and implement experiment system for user study with automated emotion detection and constant heart rate collection while providing electrotactile feedback in scenarios of differing stress level after which self-reported anxiety levels are being collected
- Weeks 6-7: Conduct a user study to explore the influence of electrotactile feedback on heartrate and emotion
- Weeks 8-10: Analyse and collate results in research paper
This study will provide a basis for future embodied affect research with electrotactile feedback.