MoodLight is an interactive ambient lighting system that responds to biosensor input related to an individual’s current level of arousal. Changes in levels of arousal correspond to fluctuations in the color of light provided by the system, altering the immediate environment in ways intimately related to the user’s private internal state. We use this intervention to explore personal and social implications of the ambient display of biosensor data. This study provides greater understanding of the ways in which the representations of personal informatics, with a focus on ambient feedback, influence our perceptions of ourselves and those around us.
Recognized stress management techniques include cultivating mindfulness, breathing exercises, and meditation. While these approaches have been shown to mitigate the negative effects of stress, they can be difficult to learn or consistently apply. To support these techniques, we developed MoodLight, a playful system that uses ambient colored light to provide feedback regarding an individual's current arousal levels. Like many affective computing systems, MoodLight was designed to help users observe their internal state and learn to relax. However, our findings indicate that prompting or leading feedback can be more effective than real time feedback in helping users relax. This work contributes to affective computing by suggesting alternative approaches to designing biofeedback systems for stress management.
In this paper, we discuss the opportunity to use plants as living information displays. This work focuses on systematic plant manipulation for affective individual feedback. Building on centuries of explicit plant manipulation and recent work in HCI, we explore the combination of personal informatics and plant-mediated feedback. We argue that plant-based information displays could offer affective, multi-sensorial and sometimes ambiguous signs for users. We describe our plant manipulation system and report the results of four experiments in this novel design space. We provide guidelines and suggestions for how designers can incorporate plant-based information displays into their work and conclude by exploring specific domains where plant-based displays could be effective as information displays for personal behavior, harnessing their accepted use in everyday settings and affective affordances.
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