Complete calm for Jonathan Palley is cruising on California’s scenic roads — mountains on one side, ocean on the other. But as soon as the 30-year-old from San Francisco turns onto a busy highway or city street, his cool evaporates. “That’s just utterly unenjoyable for me,” he says.
Palley’s wearable device, Spire, concurs. The technology, which Palley helped develop, tracks physical activity and state of mind by detecting users’ breathing patterns. It captures Palley’s relaxed Zen state during peaceful stretches of driving, for example, and boredom during dull ones. And when he’s uptight at work? The device might vibrate or a phone notification might suggest he take a deep breath.
“We get these moments when we don’t realize [we’re tense] … or we’re in these moments that we really want to celebrate and identify the calm,” says Palley, the CEO and co-founder of Spire, which he launched in November with Neema Moraveji, director of Stanford University’s Calming Technology Lab. “That’s what Spire is really about.”
In a crowded market of fitness trackers, Spire — a small stone that clips onto your pants or bra and syncs with a phone app — stands out for attending to the mind as much as the body. Being, a watch-like mindfulness device from the Asian company Zensoriumin, also tracks mood using a sensor that measures heart rate variability and blood pressure. Some artists and scientists are experimenting with emotion-detecting wearables such as a sweater that changes colors based on the wearer’s excitement and even a bra that alerts women when they might be tempted to overeat due to personal triggers like stress. (Sorry ladies, it’s not on the market!)
While there are effective devices for exercise motivation and weight loss, “there haven’t really been devices on the market that deal with the other side of this equation — what about the times that you’re not moving?” Palley says. “How do we create healthier habits during those times?”
A Tool for Self-Awareness
Americans are stressed: According to the latest “Stress in America” survey from the American Psychological Association, respondents rated their stress levels as 4.9 on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being “little or no” stress, and 10 being “a great deal” of stress) and believed a level of 3.7 is healthy. Perhaps more concerning, 42 percent of the more than 3,000 adults said they weren’t doing enough or weren’t sure they were doing enough to manage their stress, while 20 percent said they don’t pursue any activity that helps them relieve stress.
“Stress is not necessarily a bad thing — stress is what we need to perform, what we need to get to the next level, but chronic stress is really where the negative effects come into play,” Palley says. “What really matters is, can you recover from that?”
With these emerging devices, developers, designers and psychologists hope the answer will increasingly be yes. By making users aware of unhealthy patterns and then helping them convert that information into action, the devices have the potential to positively impact mood, stress levels and behavior, says Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist who directs the Media Psychology Research Center in Newport Beach, California.
“The more you know about yourself, the easier it is … to make changes,” she says. And while people are increasingly aware of the number of steps they’re taking or the number of calories they’re eating, “people don’t have the same understanding of mood,” Rutledge says.
Spire has seen promising results: In an analysis of collective user data, Palley says the company found that about 75 percent of the time it sends a notification, users breathe more deeply — lowering tension in turn — within 90 seconds. “We’re able to eliminate so much tension and stress from that very simple interaction,” Palley says.
Biologically, it makes sense, Rutledge says. “If you take a deep breath, it changes the information your body receives, and it actually reverses that impact,” she says. “You can’t help but relax if you take a deep breath.”
Wearing Your Emotions on Your Sleeve
At Microsoft Research, principal research designer Asta Roseway and her team are working on wearables that don’t just give people insight into their emotions, but also allow them to share findings with others. Take a butterfly pin called MoodWings that flutters when your stress level rises, or a scarf that can heat up when you’re sad and play cheerful music when you’re happy.
Roseway’s team often makes themselves “guinea pigs” for such ideas. She and one colleague, for instance, are connected to each other’s data and get notified when the other’s stress levels appear high. “When I get notified, I’ll just text him and say, ‘You OK? You cool?’ and we laugh about it,” Roseway says. (She’s also noticed she has “very strong responses” when she sees dragons on “Game of Thrones.”)
“People say to me all the time, ‘Why would I ever want to show you how I’m feeling?’ That’s really vulnerable,” Roseway says. “But there are genuine audiences that have expressed a desire to be able to emote things that they find difficult to emote.” For example, people on the autism spectrum or people with post-traumatic stress disorder — as well as their loved ones — might benefit from the wearables, she says. Such devices might also help breed empathy in the workplace, aid doctors who can’t tell how they’re coming across to patients or help adult children keep tabs on their aging parents across the country.
But for now, the devices in Roseway’s lab are only experimental. Eventually, their work will help inform developers like Palley about what works best to improve people’s emotional and mental health. “There are all sorts of really interesting potential pathways that this could lead to,” Roseway says, “and part of the goal of research is to try to open some of those doors.”
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Wearable Technology Can Now Detect Your Emotions originally appeared on usnews.com
