AffectCam: arousal- augmented sensecam for richer recall of episodic memories

This paper describes the design and evaluation of AffectCam, a wearable system integrating SenseCam and BodyMedia SenseWear for capturing galvanic skin response as a measure of bodily arousal. AffectCam's algorithms use arousal as a filtering mechanism for selecting the most personally relevant photos captured during people's ordinary daily life, i.e. high arousal photos. We discuss initial findings showing that emotional arousal does improve the quality of memory recall associated with emotionally arousing events. In particular, the high arousal photos support richer recall of episodic memories than low arousal ones, i.e. over 50% improvement. We also consider how various phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical memories such as event, emotions, thoughts, place and time are differently cued by the AffectCam.