The technology of smartwatch, voice user interface, and Virtual Reality provides a possible solution to the mentioned problems of self-tracking above. Smartwatch with GPS sensor and bio-sensors provides a way for passive tracking as they can track users’ daily activities automatically and continuously without forcing users to make extra efforts. Voice user interface(VUI) allows user to record their thoughts in natural conversations, lessening their burden of finding a specific time or place to journal their thoughts. Virtual Reality provides an immersive environment for visualizing the self-tracking data and allows for interaction and sharing. Personalized VR is a concept to design and implement the Virtual Reality setting based on users' unique perceptive features of personal experiences. PVR system is built by extracting multi-sensory elements from the personal memory and experience and finding the symbols or features that can be digitally rendered for the user to recall sensations in their memory. It is believed to provide a more long-lasting relaxation effect, better elicit and modulate emotion, and enhance the sense of presence than traditional relaxing VR. Combining these technologies, we plan to create a self-tracking and personalized virtual reality application for the purpose of improving people’s self-reflection and mental wellness. The application can track users’ heart rate variability and location during the day time by a smartwatch, and daily thoughts and reflections by Alexa. The data will be used to create an interactive virtual reality environment of the user’s day and can be shared with other people.
Specifically and ideally, we want to incorporate the following ideas:
- Positioning System: smartwatch with a GPS sensor enables us to record the journey of everyday life. Similar to the vision of the live social map app of close friends, Zenly, we want to create a personal diary showing where users have been and keep memories of their real-life interactions to help them reflect on their life in a day.
- Body Data Detection: smartwatch with bio-sensors is able to provide us with automated information–pulse, temperature, heart rate, and the like. According to the research on the relationship between people’s emotions and heart rate, the finding that heart rate was significantly lower in the amused condition than in the angry, fearful and neutral condition[10] enables us to provide a general prediction of users’ emotion during a day based on the data of their body.
- Virtual Personal Space (refer to Fig.2): users will own a personal space where they can interact like a diary notebook to record anything that happened in their daily life.
- Virtual Assistant (optional): like the artificially intelligent system Jarvis accompanied by Tony Stark in the Marvel movies, an avatar with the support of Alexa that offers people an intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day can act as a friend, a psychologist, or any character that users prefer to provide the most intimate experience for users on reflecting their lives. The Alexa Skills Kit enables users to engage with the service naturally with voice without spending any extra effort like typing, writing, or focusing on a screen.
- Shortcut of the Day: with the location and body data detected through the smartwatch, users may receive a “report” that highlights their life of a day with an intelligent prediction of the mood associated with the events that happened in particular time periods by combining the data of heart rate and the positioning system. For example, a user went to a gym place in the morning and the smartwatch detected a high level of heart rate. In the shortcut of the day that the user could review in the virtual personal space, there will be a line of a summary saying that from ten to twelve in the morning, you might be in an exercising mode as you had a relatively high heart rate and the location display that you were at the gym at that time.
- Intelligent Mood Promotion System: if the system summarizes the user’s mood as negative, the environment of the virtual personal space will change to simulate the environment that can lighten their mood. Studies have shown that exposure to sunlight, spending leisure time in green spaces, and physical activity each had a positive impact on people’s mental health, including depression, anxiety, and stress states[11]. Imagine a possible scenario (refer to Fig.1): when the user returns home and enters the virtual space we create, she could share random thoughts about her day with the virtual assistant–an avatar we create (refer to Fig.3). The system will recognize the emotions involved in the sentences and automatically record them with a template. On the other hand, the data of the heart rate, steps, location, and other related information from the watch can be also taken into account for generating a “daily report”. The user is then able to reflect on her life like watching a video that includes the places she has been to and the corresponding body data. The system will also summarize the user's general mood–whether it is negative or positive. If the mood is sadness correlated, the user will be brought to a room with warm light and chill music in the headset. In the end, self-tracking is accomplished in an intuitive and immersive way, and the user’s mental wellness has also been relaxed and maintained.