Animo: Sharing Biosignals on a Smartwatch for Lightweight Social Connection
This work addresses the need for mood-centric social computing systems on smartwatches, though it is incremental in exploring design features for biosignal communication.
The researchers tackled the problem of enabling lightweight social connections by developing Animo, a smartwatch app for sharing and viewing biosignals like heart rate, and found that it facilitated new communication patterns in a two-week study with 34 participants.
We present Animo, a smartwatch app that enables people to share and view each other's biosignals. We designed and engineered Animo to explore new ground for smartwatch-based biosignals social computing systems: identifying opportunities where these systems can support lightweight and mood-centric interactions. In our work we develop, explore, and evaluate several innovative features designed for dyadic communication of heart rate. We discuss the results of a two-week study (N=34), including new communication patterns participants engaged in, and outline the design landscape for communicating with biosignals on smartwatches.