Principal Investigator Rosalind Picard
Project Website http://ttt.media.mit.edu/research/health.html
A variety of legacy and emerging health applications are designed to monitor sensed information about a person’s physiological signals over time. Such applications include systems for tracking heart conditions that have been in use by cardiologists for decades, to recent prototypes for monitoring elders in cognitive decline.
This research focuses on addressing the challenges inherent in an interactive monitoring system—how and when to interact with a user. The project explores how to interact through social-emotional and relational dialogue, and when to interact by adjusting the timing of these interruptions.
An interactive, health application has been developed for data collection, annotation, and feedback. Long-term research is planned for gathering data to understand more about stress, the physiological signals involved in its expression, and the interplay between stress and interruptibility.
The system has been developed on a mobile platform. It uses affect and interruption-sensitive strategies to engage users and allow for real-time annotation of stress, activity, and timing information, through text and audio input.