Wearable Technologies for Emotional Dialogue

The aim of this paper is to discuss the possibilities of exploring new ways of expressing the feelings and emotions with wearable technologies. In this paper the term “Wearable Technologies” would be used to define and cover the examples of garments and accessories that have smart technologies embedded in order to create customizable, dynamic and responsive wearable products such as the computational garments, digital accessories or the digital jewelry.

People mostly communicate their emotions by observable bodily reactions such as facial expressions, gestures, and body movements. Visual expression of emotion could be augmented by adding artificial visual responses to the physiological visual responses of the body with garments and accessories. Wearable Technologies define a new experience of clothing with the possibility to create interactively changing appearances. The dynamic visual compositions defined by the user and provided by the computational processes could enhance the abilities of the user for the expression of emotions.