iAware: A Real-Time Emotional Biofeedback System Based on Physiological Signals

Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Most people can recognize their own and others' emotions. However, many people suffer from a common infirmity that prevents them from recognizing emotion within themselves and are therefore unable to experience a life that fulfills them emotionally. We propose a real-time mobile biofeedback system that uses wearable sensors to depict five basic emotions and provides the user with emotional feedback. We also present empirical results for the configuration of a physiological signal-based emotion recognition system in two experimental scenarios involving controlled and noncontrolled environmental settings. In our evaluation, we show that iAware helps increase emotional self-awareness by reducing the predictive error by 3.333% for women and by 16.673% for men. The primary results suggest the usefulness and necessity of the iAware system to provide users with real-time biofeedback based on physiological signals.