HeartBees: Visualizing Crowd Affects
This addresses the challenge of affective sharing in groups for applications like health and productivity, but it is incremental as it builds on existing affective computing and visualization methods.
The paper tackled the problem of creating relatable and accessible visualizations of collective emotional states by proposing HeartBees, a bio-feedback system that maps physiological data into a metaphorical bird flock visualization, and evaluation with 353 online participants showed good consensus in subjective perception.
Affective sharing within groups strengthens coordination and empathy, leads to better health outcomes, and increases productivity and performance. Existing tools for affective sharing face one main challenge: creating a representation of collective emotional states that is relatable and universally accessible. To overcome this challenge, we propose HeartBees, a bio-feedback system for visualizing collective emotional states, which maps a multi-dimensional emotion model into a metaphorical visualization of flocks of birds. Grounded on Affective Computing literature and physiological sensing, we mapped physiological indicators that could be obtained from wearable devices into a multi-dimensional emotion model, which, in turn, our HeartBees can make use of. We evaluated our nature-inspired interactive system with 353 online participants, whose responses showed good consensus in the way they subjectively perceived the visualizations. Last, we discuss practical applications of HeartBees.