Subliminally Hack Your Heart with ambienBeat
A wrist-worn heart rate regulator to help manage stress and stay awake.
Life can be a balancing act when it comes to managing stress. There are a lot of external stimuli that we utilize to reset our bodies like drinking a cup of coffee to stay awake late at night or some herbal tea to get to bed. MIT's Tangible Media Group wants to take a new approach to our external health by using our own internal heartbeat to subliminally hack our well-being with ambienBeat.
ambienBeat, created by Kyung Yun Choi may be worn on your wrist but it is very different from your average tech-packed smartwatch. Many smartwatches are equipped with a heart rate sensor, that allows users to see what their heartbeat is in real-time. But where ambienBeat differs, is it also functions as a heart rate regulator. This means that ambienBeat not only senses your heart rate but can help guide the wearer to either speed up or slow down their heart rate.
ambienBeat does this by pulsating the silicone membrane on the top of the device using a voice-coil actuator. Your hand feels the rhythmic beat of ambienBeat and is subliminally guided to either speed up or slow down the users' heart rate to match the pattern ambienBeat produces. So instead of pounding your third cup of joe to stay alert during a drive home at night, ambienBeat could help reset your internal clock as Kyung Yun Choi shows in her feature video.
Make sure to continue checking out Tangible Media Group's projects to see what other unique technologies they create.