Your pen, your pal

Squeezing, rolling, wiggling – the things people do when they are stressed. Now here’s a pen that not only knows when people are stressed but also relaxes them.

Empathic technology, devices that know how you feel and act correspondingly, is the next big thing in man-machine interaction. Already there are cars that give feedback on your driving style, or alarm clocks that wait to ring until the person moves. PhD researcher Miguel Bruns Alonso (Industrial Design) now wants to take this concept one step further: devices that interact subconsciously with the user. As a contrasting example, he mentions the anti-RSI computer programme, Workpace, which simply tells people when to relax or might temporarily block your work in progress for your own well-being. “It’s so in your face,” Bruns says.

Instead, he has developed an affective pen to explore how a product could provide feedback directly, coupled to the actions of the user. He noticed that when students take exams, they tend to endlessly fidget with their pens, rather than simply writing down the correct answers. The affective pen not only notices this stressed shaking and twirling but also counteracts these movements by means of built-in electronics and electro magnets. “People like the feeling of the loose ball in the top of the pen,” Bruns says. “When users move the pen less, the magnet gradually loosens the ball more.”

Frankly, tests comparing the pen’s active feedback with the feedback switched-off were a bit disappointing – people didn’t really notice the difference. Nor did they report that they felt more relaxed when working with the pen. So had it all been in vain? Perhaps not. Although people didn’t feel more relaxed, their heartbeats were actually 5 percent lower thanks to the magic pen. It seems then that the feedback had worked subliminally.

Miguel Bruns Alonso, ‘Relax! Inherent feedback during product interaction to reduce stress’, 23 December 2010, PhD supervisors Professor Paul Hekkert and Professor David Keyson.