Emotion Actuator: Embodied Emotional Feedback through Electroencephalography and Electrical Muscle Stimulation

The human body reveals emotional and bodily states through measurable signals, such as body language and electroen-cephalography. However, such manifestations are difficult to communicate to others remotely. We propose EmotionActuator, a proof-of-concept system to investigate the transmission of emotional states in which the recipient performs emotional gestures to understand and interpret the state of the sender. We call this kind of communication embodied emotional feedback, and present a prototype implementation. To realize our concept we chose four emotional states: amused, sad, angry, and neutral. We designed EmotionActuator through a series of studies to assess emotional classification via EEG, and create an EMS gesture set by comparing composed gestures from the literature to sign-language gestures. Through a final study with the end-to-end prototype interviews revealed that participants like implicit sharing of emotions and find the embodied output to be immersive, but want to have control over shared emotions and with whom. This work contributes a proof of concept system and set of design recommendations for designing embodied emotional feedback systems.