Affective Umbrella - A Wearable System to Visualize Heart and Electrodermal Activity, towards Emotion Regulation through Somaesthetic Appreciation

In this paper, we introduce Affective Umbrella, a novel system to record, analyze and visualize physiological data in real time via an umbrella handle. We implement a biofeedback loop design in the system that triggers visualization changes to reflect and regulate emotions through somaesthetic appreciation. We report the methodology, processes, and results of data reliability and visual feedback impact on emotions. We evaluated the system using a real-life user study (n=21) in rainy weather at night. The statistical results demonstrate the potential of applying the visualization of biofeedback to regulate emotional arousal with a significantly higher (p=.0022) score, a lower (p=.0277) dominance than baseline from self-reported SAM Scale, and physiological arousal, which was shown to be significantly increased (p<.0001) with biofeedback in terms of pNN50 and a significant difference in terms of RMSSD. There was no significant difference in terms of emotional valence changes from SAM scale. Furthermore, we compared the difference between two biofeedback patterns (mirror and inversion). The mirror effect was with a significantly higher emotional arousal than the inversion effect (p=.0277) from SAM results and was with a significantly lower RMSSD performance than the inversion effect (p<.0001). This work demonstrates the potential for capturing physiological data using an umbrella handle and using this data to influence a user's emotional state via lighting effects.