ThermalWear: Exploring Wearable On-chest Thermal Displays to Augment Voice Messages with Affect Abdallah El Ali;Xingyu Yang;Swamy Ananthanarayan;Thomas Röggla;Jack Jansen;Jess Hartcher-O'Brien;Kaspar Jansen;Pablo Cesar
CHI'20: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Session: Turn up the heat
Abstract
Voice is a rich modality for conveying emotions, however emotional prosody production can be situationally or medically impaired. Since thermal displays have been shown to evoke emotions, we explore how thermal stimulation can augment perception of neutrally-spoken voice messages with affect. We designed ThermalWear, a wearable on-chest thermal display, then tested in a controlled study (N=12) the effects of fabric, thermal intensity, and direction of change. Thereafter, we synthesized 12 neutrally-spoken voice messages, validated (N=7) them, then tested (N=12) if thermal stimuli can augment their perception with affect. We found warm and cool stimuli (a) can be perceived on the chest, and quickly without fabric (4.7-5s) (b) do not incur discomfort (c) generally increase arousal of voice messages and (d) increase / decrease message valence, respectively. We discuss how thermal displays can augment voice perception, which can enhance voice assistants and support individuals with emotional prosody impairments.
DOI::
WEB::
Video preview for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2020
0 Comments