Designing Thermal Feedback for Notifying Users About Stress

Though many new technologies have been adopted for stress detection, communicating stress to the users is still experienced primarily through visual or auditory channels. However, these commonly used feedback channels are already associated with smartphone notifications. Instead, we focus on thermal feedback yielding the advantage to preserve privacy due to its unobtrusiveness. By this work, we contribute an investigation of thermal feedback for notifying users about stress comprising the exploration of the preferred temperature level, rate of change, and body location. Accordingly, we compared different stimuli for each for those in a user study involving 21 participants. From their quantitative and qualitative feedback, we found that cold stimuli are preferred in general, showing that ± − 0.5◦C is the optimal rate of change and preferably when presented at the lower back. We conclude with discussing our findings from both the quantitative and qualitative data and finally present our research agenda paving the way for thermal feedback as a stress notifier.