Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design.

A human's heart beating can be sensed by sensors and displayed for others to see, hear, feel, and potentially "resonate'' with. Previous work in studying interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their health and wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, we designed and explored multimodal displays, which enable experiencing heart beats as natural stimuli from oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we report on the design process of our design PiHearts and present qualitative results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use PiHearts during watching short movies together and report their perceived experience in three different display conditions while watching movies. We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they received their own heart beats as stimuli compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to motivate and discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how digitalization of heart beats as rhythmic natural stimuli may provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.