The emotional economy for the augmented human

Abstract

Happiness research findings are increasingly being taken into account in standard economics. However, most findings are based on a posteriori surveys trying to infer how happy people have been. In this paper, we argue that the advances in wearable computing, especially brain-computer interfaces, can lead to realtime measurements of happiness. We then propose a new kind of economy model where people pay depending on the emotions they have experienced. We have combined current commercial-on-the-shelf software and hardware components to create a proof-of-concept of the model.