We have designed a prototype of an affective wearable computer and
demonstrated many issues that need to be considered in the development
of such systems. Bio-metric sensors need to be developed that are
both accurate and robust to motion artifacts yet unobtrusive and
comfortable to wear. Sensors that can allow the wearable to be aware
of the users context (home or office), and level of physical activity
(sitting, walking, coughing) need to be incorporated. Pattern
recognition and analysis techniques for affect recognition which
integrate this context information and which are able to operate in
real time on a single user need to be developed. Such developments
will enable many new future applications, some of which are described
here. We also demonstrated one major step toward one of the
information-overload management applications, the StartleCam, which
has already been achieved with the current state of affective and
wearable technology.