Breeze: Sharing Biofeedback Through Wearable Technologies
This work addresses enhancing connectedness and empathy for users through wearable biofeedback, but it is incremental as it builds on existing biofeedback methods with a focus on breathing.
The paper tackled the problem of conveying breathing as biofeedback through wearable technology, finding that participants modified their own breathing to match the feedback to understand emotions, with results describing how pattern features and modalities influenced perception.
Digitally presenting physiological signals as biofeedback to users raises awareness of both body and mind. This paper describes the effectiveness of conveying a physiological signal often overlooked for communication: breathing. We present the design and development of digital breathing patterns and their evaluation along three output modalities: visual, audio, and haptic. We also present Breeze, a wearable pendant placed around the neck that measures breathing and sends biofeedback in real-time. We evaluated how the breathing patterns were interpreted in a fixed environment and gathered qualitative data on the wearable device's design. We found that participants intentionally modified their own breathing to match the biofeedback, as a technique for understanding the underlying emotion. Our results describe how the features of the breathing patterns and the feedback modalities influenced participants' perception. We include guidelines and suggested use cases, such as Breeze being used by loved ones to increase connectedness and empathy.