Crystal Tong
Crystal’s concept is to use technology to monitor changes in the emotional state of a user to help improve emotional and mental health. Using data collected from a wearable device that monitors physiological changes from a user, such as galvanic skin response and heart rate detection, the user’s environment could be altered to balance emotional and mental states such as stress, anxiety and depression. Crystal told me that the inspiration for this idea comes from her personal experience of having difficulty balancing decision making with logic and emotions. From this she became interested in experimenting with non-verbal communication and technology.
How can people who are unable to or have a difficult time verbally communicating their emotional or mental state use technology to accomplish this? Achieving such a goal has potentially postive and practical outcomes for a user’s signicant other, friends, family and co-workers. There is even room to expand such a technology’s use to helping children with behavioral health problems such as autism. A slightly different option would be to utilize such a technology for entertainment and leisure, such as an enhanced version of Google Glass that would begin recording an event when you were excited or change the music in a room based on the emotional state of the user or people present.
Crystal’s main research question is essentially how effective wearable technology can help users with emotional and mental health in ways that are finely tailored and personal to the user. For one person a particular song or picture might help them calm down from stress and anxiety, for another it could be the smell of their favorite food. The domains Crystal’s work are situated in are sociology, psychology, wearable technology, entertainment, behavioral health therapy, the internet of things and the quantified self.
The stakeholders that relate to these domains would be:
- primary / user: People and children with emotional and psychological issues.
- secondary: the user’s partner, family members, co-workers, classmates, networks and community members.
- tertiary: public safety, health care, civic, the medical system.
As precents Crystal sited several research studies. One included a team that designed a car to respond to the driver’s physiological data. When the driver was feeling stressed the car’s temperature would change and the dashboard would change color to blue. One researcher that Crystal is fond of is Jessie Healey who has done a good deal of research in physiological computing and communicating with the world non-verbally.
Overall I believe Crystal has a strong potential in her concept and that it could have very influential outcomes in her domains. The difficulties will be creating a wearable device as well as an application that can be used with data taken from the device. I do think a convincing prototype could be created within the second year of the MFA DT program.