Human Computer Integration Lab

Interactive computing systems are able to receive, as inputs, activity generated by the user's physiology (e.g., skin conductance, heart rate, brain potentials, and so forth). Besides health-related applications, this type of physiological sensing enables systems to infer users' states (e.g., task engagement, anxiety, workload, and so forth). More recently, a number of techniques emerged that can also stimulate physiological activity (e.g., electrical muscle stimulation, galvanic vestibular stimulation, transcranial stimulation). These can serve as outputs of an interactive system to induce desired behavior in the user. Taken together, we envision systems that will close the loop between physiological input and output–interactive systems able to read and influence the user's body.

To realize this, we (Pedro Lopes, Lewis Chuang and Pattie Maes) proposed a Special Interest Group (SIG) on Physiological I/O (at CHI21) that will consolidate successful practices and identify research challenges to address as a community.You can read our white paper here (CHI21 SIG paper), which tries to define the area and its inherent challenges (closing the loop, lack of precision, ethics, privacy, security, moving from toy problems to principles, calibration, designing, and agency).