Description

1. Local User Hello! How Are you? Local User Interactive Potted Plants for Emotion Control Aithne Seng-Yeng Pao, Emelie KaiFeng Cheng, Kenghao Chang Description The potted plant is not only served as a representation of user's emotions, but also a media for long-distance users to interact with each other, and show their consideration for each other. We use EEG as an input device to detect specific emotions of the user. For example, it is known that the frontal EEG asymmetry represents depression. We will focus especially on emotions with significant EEG patterns, such as depression and anxiety disorders. We choose potted plant as the tangible interface because it can be more than a home decoration. There are lots of possibilities with the potted plant; for example, the interaction of watering plant can be used as a metaphor of care; dried-up and yellow leaves can represent unattended and bad mood; green leaves can represent vitality and good mood. Interaction Scenario There is a pair of potted plants: one plant is placed in the remote and the other is placed locally. When the local user is depressed, the leaves of both plants would wither, which tells the remote user that the local user needs his/her care. Brain Wave Read-Out Local User Remote User By watering the plant, the leaves of local plant would turn green, which makes the depressed person knows that somebody is paying attention to him/her. At the same time the watering action may trigger the local plant to emit music to ease the local user's depression. Local User Remote User In addition to watering the plant, the remote user can send message to the local user via the plant. When emote user send a message, a fruit on the local plant will drop. Local user pick up the fruit, open it, and read the message inside it. After the interactions between the users and plant, the local user is cheered up. When he/she no longer feels depressed, the plants will receive the non-depressed EEG signals and bloom again.