AuraWear & PulsePlay: Merging Emotion and Music for a Journey of Self-Discovery
AuraWear and its companion app, PulsePlay, form a cutting-edge system designed to deepen users' understanding of their identity and emotions. The two projects were created by Jiayuan (Wren) Wang for her thesis, The Me Within: Navigating Layers of Self which explores the duality of existence that spans physical and digital realms. AuraWear uses heart rate variability sensors to detect subtle emotional shifts, translating them into dynamic visual cues through lighting. Meanwhile, PulsePlay curates music playlists that align with the user's emotional state, guiding them through their emotional landscape. Together, this innovative integration of wearable technology and responsive musical feedback offers a unique path to self-discovery through the universal language of music.
AuraWear: Smart Wearable Technology for Emotional Expression
AuraWear is a wearable smart device that utilizes advanced sensor technology to monitor and interpret the wearer’s emotional states. Designed for daily wear, this earpiece captures subtle physiological changes and translates them into easy-to-understand visual and auditory signals, enhancing personal emotional awareness and management.
The innovative concept of AuraWear is to externalize one’s inner self, making personal emotions visible and audible through wearable technology, significantly enhancing emotional awareness and connectivity. This device transforms advanced physical health monitoring technology to enhance mental well-being, addressing a largely untapped market for emotional health.
Advanced Sensing Technology: Equipped with heart rate variability sensors, AuraWear meticulously tracks emotional fluctuations, providing users with real-time insights into their feelings.
Visual Feedback: Integrated LEDs adjust their colors to reflect the wearer’s mood, offering a visual representation of emotional states that can aid in communication and personal understanding.
Seamless Music Integration: In partnership with the PulsePlay app, AuraWear influences music playback based on detected emotions, either reinforcing the current state or helping to shift to a more desired emotional condition.
PulsePlay: Revolutionizing Music Through Emotional Insight
Complementing AuraWear, PulsePlay acts as an essential hardware and software platform, enhancing how users experience mood-congruent music. It leverages biometric data from AuraWear to analyze the user’s current mood. This sophisticated system intelligently identifies emotional patterns and uses them to generate music recommendations that either reflect the user’s mood or help in altering it for emotional regulation.
Personalized Playlists: Leveraging the biometric data from AuraWear, PulsePlay customizes music playlists that resonate with the wearer's current mood or assist in achieving a desired emotional state through carefully selected tracks.
Intelligent Algorithm: The app’s core algorithm combines emotional analysis with user music preferences to generate music recommendations that are finely tuned to the user’s emotional needs and historical listening patterns.
Dynamic Adaptation: PulsePlay’s features such as EmoSense and MoodShift not only cater to immediate emotional needs but also learn from user interactions, continually refining music suggestions to enhance emotional well-being and engagement.
Together, AuraWear and PulsePlay offer a comprehensive solution for emotional regulation and self-discovery. These technologies work in harmony to provide users with an unprecedented level of insight into their emotional lives, empowering them to manage and express their feelings more effectively through the innovative use of wearable technology and personalized music therapy.
To learn more about Jiayuan (Wren) Wang's work, take a look at the other thesis projects that make up The Me Within: Navigating Layers of Self. Find more of her design work at wrenwang.com.