Abstract

A wearable computer that perceives and responds to the wearer's affective state offers a new kind of perceptual interface. Instead of asking the user to continuously select preferences from a menu, the affective wearable gets to know its wearer's preferences by recognizing and responding to signals that carry emotional information. This paper presents a new design for an affective wearable interface, aimed at applications that do not require extensive access to a keyboard and monitor. We replace the standard hand-held keyboard and monitor worn over the eye with a Palm Pilot interface, and modify the Palm Pilot software to accept physiological input as well as traditional forms of input. The complete system can capture patterns from many kinds of user behavior, which can potentially be used to learn good predictors of user preferences. The new application presented here uses the new affective wearable system to aid in music selection by incorporating not only stated user preferences, but also physiological variables that might be indicative of the user's present mood.