CoupleVIBE

Abstract

Long-distance couples face considerable communication challenges in their relationships. Unlike collocated couples, long-distance couples lack awareness cues associated with physical proximity and must use technologies such as SMS or telephony to stay in sync. We posit that long-distance couples have needs that are not met by prevailing communication technologies, which require explicit action from the sender as well as the receiver. We built CoupleVIBE to explore the properties of an implicit messaging channel and observe how couples would use such a technology.CoupleVIBE is a mobile application that automatically pushes a user's location-information to her partner's mobile phone via vibrotactile cues. We present qualitative results of a four-week user study, studying how seven couples used CoupleVIBE. A key result is that CoupleVIBE's implicit communication modality operated as a foundation that helps keep couples in sync, with other modalities being brought into play when further interaction was needed.

Augmenting Couples' Communication with Lifelines

“…Previous work explored diverse streams of contextual information for mediating awareness, e.g. location cues [5,12]; travel time to a contact's location [8]; drinking moments through a connected cup [15]; playing music [7,32]; ambient sounds [32]; appointments in a calendar [49], in-chat heart rate visualizations [24]; and motion in front of a camera [44,45] or between locations [9].…”

“…All studies focus on how single streams are used by couples to support their relational needs. For example, location [5], motion ("moving", "not moving") [9], playing music [7], and heart rate information [24] correlate with increased feelings of connectedness, provide peace of mind (i.e., knowing that their partners were safe and sound), and signal availability. Heart rate [24] and music [7] also spark conversations about partners' contexts.…”

“…knowing the partner's location replaced asking "where are you?' [5,46]), whereas other types of data triggered direct communication (e.g. heart rate triggered "what are you doing?"…”

“…HCI literature has explored a more expansive view of couple communication, providing partners with diverse types of data about each others' context when apart [23]. Researchers have mediated awareness by streaming different forms of contextual information, such as location [5], motion [9] or ambient sound [32]. By leveraging the knowledge couples have of their partner's routines, this minimal information helped them to find peace of mind, coordinate everyday tasks, increase feelings of connectedness, and support other relational needs [5,8,9,24,32,46].…”

Breeze

“…While brushing, touch, and heat might become very natural communication channels for sharing biofeedback, they currently require bespoke hardware or present latency issues, making them unsuitable to convey continuous breathing data. As such, we decided to use vibration, a low-cost, widely available solution that is already used in the literature to support implicit communication between distant couples [6]. We mapped the breath amplitude to the intensity (amplitude) of the vibration.…”