EvoK: Connecting loved ones through Heart Rate sharing
This addresses social isolation for individuals by providing a novel way to connect through physiological data, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing wearable and notification technologies.
The authors tackled the problem of social isolation and loneliness by developing EvoK, a system that shares heart rate between close contacts using wearable devices, resulting in a prototype with continuous sensing and multi-modal notifications.
In this work, we present EvoK, a new way of sharing one's heart rate with feedback from their close contacts to alleviate social isolation and loneliness. EvoK consists of a pair of wearable prototype devices (i.e., sender and receiver). The sender is designed as a headband enabling continuous sensing of heart rate with aesthetic designs to maximize social acceptance. The receiver is designed as a wristwatch enabling unobtrusive receiving of the loved one's continuous heart rate with multi-modal notification systems.