Emotional design with ambient intelligence

Technologies like the smart technology, wearable devices, and Kinect technology are up and coming. Many major corporations like Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Philips, Microsoft and Sumsung have heavily invested in the research and development of these technologies. Despite these distruptive products and technologies introduced into the market, there is a lack of a product that incorporates all these technologies into one product. Therefore, in this project, the author proposed a primary design concept of a product that includes the Kinect technology, wearable device and colour changing lights to improve and enhance the moods of users. The Kinect technology and the wearable device create a smart environment that is able to detect the physiological effects of an emotional change. Through processing a database, the colour of the lights can change to enhance and improve the emotions of the users. The author seeks to understand the common emotions and the perceived feasibility of such an environment of users after a long day of work through a pre-experiment survey. An experiment is then conducted for a smaller sample size. The objective of the experiment is to put forth the physical effects of the colour changing lights to the participants. The author seeks their opinions and feedbacks on the improvements of the colour changing lights on their emotions through a post-experiment survey. The findings from the experiment show the shift of intenesity of emotions from average spectrum before the experiment to the extreme sides of the spectrum of intensity. This shows the improvement on the intensity of the emotions by the colour changing lights. The users have also expressed that they felt a large degree of improvements to their emotions after the experiment. However, further investigation could be conducted on a larger group of participants to establish a relationship between the colour changing lights to improvements of emotions. Furthermore, this research can also be further improved on by incorporating a more realistic smart environment where the Kinect technology is used to detect the physological changes of emotions through speech processing, facial processing, body gestures and galvanic skin conductance.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering