Self-Monitoring of Emotions and Mood Using a Tangible Approach

Nowadays Personal Informatics (PI) devices are used for sensing and saving personal data, everywhere and at any time, helping people improve their lives by highlighting areas of good and bad performances and providing a general awareness of different levels of conduct. However, not all these data are suitable to be automatically collected. This is especially true for emotions and mood. Moreover, users without experience in self-tracking may have a misperception of PI applications’ limits and potentialities. We believe that current PI tools are not designed with enough understanding of such users’ needs, desires, and problems they may encounter in their everyday lives. We designed and prototype the Mood TUI (Tangible User Interface), a PI tool that supports the self-reporting of mood data using a tangible interface. The platform is able to gather six different mood states and it was tested through several participatory design sessions in a secondary/high school. The solution proposed allows gathering mood values in an amusing, simple, and appealing way. Users appreciated the prototypes, suggesting several possible improvements as well as ideas on how to use the prototype in similar or totally different contexts, and giving us hints for future research.