Project Us: A Wearable for Enhancing Empathy

Enhancing the empathy of our human interactions has been the object of intensive psychological studies for decades. The emergence of affective computing has opened the door towards technologically-enabled solutions. Yet, existing techniques struggle to attain their desired impact, often being difficult and expensive to deliver, and disconnected from daily life. Project Us' goal is to help overcome these challenges through a pair of wearable devices (in this case wristbands) that aim to trigger an empathy-enhancing effect, when being worn by two people during day-to-day conversations. The small-sized, wireless devices sense each person's electrodermal activity, associated with their level of emotional arousal, and share it to the other partner (when a threshold is exceeded) through a discreet, haptic nudge, creating a real-time feedback loop. The user study performed with 18 participants (nine romantically engaged couples) revealed that most of them found the wristbands to increase their level of awareness of the partner's emotional experience. Their interaction was analyzed based on interviews (qualitatively), and natural language processing techniques (quantitatively).