Emote

Julio Terra

Emote is a platform for tracking my emotions and creating high-resolution visualizations that explore sources of meaning and fulfillment in my life.



Emotions are important. They strongly affect how we experience reality by influencing our perception, choices and actions. Emotions are also messy and hard to measure. They are highly subjective short-lived phenomena created by interactions between physiological and cognitive processes in response to our psychological, social and physical context.

Emote explores methodologies for collecting and integrating high-resolution data about the physiological states, cognitive processes, and contextual factors associated with my emotions. To uncover insights from this data, Emote uses visualization approaches to highlight correlations between my emotions and activities, people, and places in my life.

Background
There are many projects and products that focus on the tracking of moods, physiology, and activities. Here is a list of some of the most interesting ones:
(1) Affectiva: this is a company that was developed by MIT MediaLab graduates and that focuses on using technology to understand better people's reactions to the world. Affectiva has two main products, the Q sensor is the one that interests me most. It is a wrist-worn sensor that measures the people's arousal through GSR. It is used primarily for market research and to study and treat autism.

(2) The Truth Wristband: the truth wristband is a playful device created by Sean Montegomery. This device provides real-time feedback about a person's level of arousal.

(3) The Feltron Report: the Feltron report is an annual report published by Nicholas Felton, a graphic designer that tracks numerous events in his own life. Though Nicholas makes no effort to track his emotional state, or arousal, I appreciate the visual flare that he has brought to his self-quantification work.

Implementation
There are three tracks in the work that I plan to do in my exploration of self-quantification for emotional growth:
(1) I will track my emotions and various other contextual information for two months, during which I will test different methodologies for capturing this information.

(2) I will create a wrist-wearable gar and heart rate sensor that will be used to provide insights regarding how our physiological response relates to our subjective experiences.

(3) I will create the design for a mobile application that will integrate the data from the wrist-band device and the most effective emotion journalling methodology I create.