WindCheck: Biofeedback for Emotion Awareness and Regulation

How to use mediated technology helping people regulate emotion is a popular topic in HCI community. Using Haptic instead of other sensory stimuli becomes a new trend. In this paper, we present WindCheck, a wearable device using wind as feedback and helping individuals notice their heartbeat and aware their emotion states. We first designed the protype and did the user studies to set wrist as a better body location to wear the device. Then we updated our protype and did an experiment according previous studies by using false feedback of a slow heart rate to regulate users’ anxiety. The result showed that the WindCheck kept the anxiety of the individuals in low levels in math challenge task. User studies showed that the feedback of wind could not only be a new stimulus in the strategy of emotion regulation, but also potentials for other design situations. We discuss the possibilities and future directions of the work.