Designing for Tangible Affective Interaction

In this paper, four interactional modes of pervasive affective sensing are identified: in situ intentional, retrospective, automatic, and reconstructive. These modes are used to discuss and highlight the challenges of designing pervasive affective sensing systems for mental health care applications. We also present the design of the Grasp platform, which consists of a hand-held, tangible stone-like object with accompanying peripherals. This device is equipped with a force sensor that registers squeezes, includes capabilities for wireless transmission of data, and comes with a crib for initiating the wireless connection and data transfer. In addition, the platform includes an app on a tablet that can render squeezes in real time or visualize the data from a given time period. In this paper, we focus mainly on the design of the tangible interaction and address the challenges of designing for in situ tangible affective interaction.