Can you feel it?: sharing heart beats with Augmento

Abstract

This paper presents Augmento, a system which aims at providing individuals with an asynchronous approach of reinforcing the bonds with their relatives by sharing emotions when they are in the vicinity of places which hold special memories of their lives. Augmento capitalizes on existing technologies to accomplish its goal, ranging from the usage of location based services, to the retrieval of the individual's physiological signals to convey typically occluded information between individuals, more particularly in long-distance relationships. The paper presents the general vision for the system, its workflow, architecture, scenarios and early prototypes. We performed an early assessment of the system and, in particular, we were interested in obtaining valuable insight whether vibrotactile feedback would be suited to convey and mimic an individual's heartbeat rate value to other users. The results for this testing period are presented and discussed in the paper.