Empathic Technology
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:23
Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. It's great that you're all here. And what I would like to talk about is really something fairly basic, which is why we're wearables, really, at all. What is in the technology that makes us human? How to make technology that makes us human?
00:46
Making technology is really what makes us human. We make things, but when we make it, that also changes who we are. And so there's a lot of choices to be made there, which is what I want to talk about. As we go forward with
01:03
technology, who we are as hardware is likely to change. The miniaturization of technology makes possible a lot of wearables we can put on our bodies. The Internet of Things makes connected technology possible, which opens
01:20
up a lot of new possibilities. There's robotics. So who we are is likely to co-evolve. And our future might be a lot like the way the hummingbird has co-evolved with a flower. It's grown a big beak to fit in certain flowers. When we make stuff, we change who we are. And so what does this
01:44
do? And what is the role for humanness in this? What do wearables tell us right now? Well, the human, according to wearables 1.0, is something like this. Sensors, a lot of
02:02
sensors, replacing the senses, augmenting how we can feel. We can improve our vision. We can also see things that are not there. We can change our environment. And we can change who we are. Now, there are some wonderful things about
02:23
that. Having sensors that can help me hone my running times when I'm an athlete is great. Having sensors that can measure my sugar levels when I'm a diabetic and send that to
02:40
a doctor or even help me correct automatically my sugar levels is fantastic. But for the rest of us, what does this do? And you could say that a lot of what it does is actually diminish what is already on our body. Mistrust what we have and replace it with some other sensor. The
03:03
sensor can produce numbers that our senses cannot. But the idea that I'll go to the gym and afterwards I should look at my wrist to find out how tired I am or that I should have a smart water bottle to tell me if I'm thirsty, that doesn't
03:23
seem to be the right thing. And one important reason that that should not be the right thing is the demand that this makes for attention. So evolution has spent millions of years embedding a lot of the cognitive processing in our brain. I don't have to think about the nervous system. I don't have to think when I reach for a glass of water. I
03:43
don't think when I sit down because I'm tired. So having sensors that produce data that then I have to process with my conscious brain is an interesting way to do this. And not the best use of my brain, really. It also affects
04:05
our attention and what our intention should be. So in order to attract our attention, what we do is that we build in things like gamification and addictive processes. So you give rewards if you walk 10,000 steps a day. You make me
04:23
scroll through screens to see if something interesting is happening. When I do that, my intention is affected in ways that I'm not necessarily thinking about. And even if I don't know it, it can be hard to break away from it. When I first got a Fitbit last year, I found myself, well, in
04:43
London, I would bike everywhere. But it doesn't count what I've cycled. It only counts what I've walked. So I was really, really tempted, and I actually did it. Take the tube and then walk a bit because that counted rather than just bike the whole thing. And in spite of my best
05:02
efforts, it was impossible to just not do that because I really liked getting the reward and just hitting the 10,000 step goal every day. So to get back on my bike, I had to stop using the Fitbit. So now the question is, when do you make choices? Did I make the choice when I leave the house, whether I take the tube or the bike, or did
05:21
I make the choice when I bought the Fitbit? So there are questions about attention and intention. And what they really go back to is a fundamental preference we give for the mind over the body. So the idea that the body is kind of weak and doesn't do things quite right, so we
05:43
want to hack our bodies and we want to hack our motivations and just make us do stuff that we wouldn't otherwise do. So I would say that the mind is weak, and it should do what it's good at, and a thing to look at is the body. And everything that happens in
06:05
your body, and the part of the body that makes yourself, and that is part of your cognition. And we do know that we don't process data. We do process experiences, and our experiences do not happen from the neck up. They do involve everything. So if we
06:23
want to make our experiences such that they make us more human, they help us do what we want to do and live the life that we want to do, we do have to engage the whole body. So I'll tell you now what we do and who we are, and then I'll go back to
06:44
some of the science behind what we do. So I'm part of a London startup company we've been running for almost two years now, Dopple. We are scientists, designers, and engineers, and our area is technology
07:01
that changes how you feel, think, and behave. And our first product is also called Dopple, and it's a wearable that can make you calm and focused or energized on demand and in a natural way. You
07:21
can use it when you're working to focus on your task. You can use it when you're giving a presentation. I always use it when I give presentations. It makes me more focused, more coherent, less nervous. You can put it on when
07:40
you want to go for a run and get yourself to run faster. You can put it on when you want to chill and relax. So how does it work? Well, actually, the science behind it, you access all the time yourself. When you want to run faster,
08:01
what you do is you put your iPod on with a fast music. When you want to wind down, you will put some slow music. Now, when you put music on to change essentially your energy level and how you feel, a lot of what is going on behind that is that your body responds
08:20
to rhythm, the rhythm of the music. The fast rhythm gets you going. Slower rhythm is calming and soothing. And essentially, this has a rhythm in it, and that rhythm is a rhythm that you feel. It works also. There doesn't have to be a rhythm that you hear. A rhythm that
08:42
you feel is something you can also do like when I'm on stage. I can't put the right music on, but I can feel the beat. But there's another thing that is important about this. The rhythm is not a simple beat. It's a heartbeat. So what you feel is a pop-up,
09:00
pop-up, pop-up, and I feel it where I would normally feel my heartbeat on the inside of my wrist where my pulse, where I can feel my pulse. And there's something important about this because we respond to other people's rhythms more than to a simple rhythm. We are tuned in to sync into people's by rhythms. It's really
09:22
interesting when you walk with somebody down the street, you will find your footsteps falling in sync. Two people sleeping in a bed together, their breathing synchronizes, people singing in the choir, their heartbeat synchronizes. A mother and a child,
09:41
actually a mother and a fetus in a very complex way, their heartbeats get in sync. There's even a study which is really interesting, fun, how lovers their heartbeats synchronize. So they have a man and a woman, lovers, sitting in chairs, looking at each other and their heartbeats get in sync
10:01
and interestingly enough is the woman that sings to the guy. So it has a beat and it has a human beat and that does affect how you feel. And we've had this externally tested. I mean, we did a lot of tests ourselves, but we also had independent expert psychologists run a control test
10:23
on this. So the standard way that you would test focus, which is what we wanted to test, is essentially a time reaction test. So what you do is that you see the subject, you put a device or the control on them and you see them in front of a computer screen
10:41
and something pops up at random times and the subject has to press the space bar when they see the light flashing. And you measure reaction times. But the interesting thing is, on average, your reaction time is about 500 milliseconds. Now, if you take longer than that, substantially longer, that means you were not
11:02
paying attention. It means you were thinking about something else. Now, on an average test that runs five minutes, you will make eight lapses. You will miss it eight times. If you wear this, it halves that. So it does work. And the
11:22
way that you would use it is that it takes one lap and you will pick the rhythms that you like. There's a library of rhythms. You can make your own. So it's a little bit like choosing your music. In this case, you choose the beat that you want to act to and feel to.
11:43
Now, what is behind this? For us, this is a first product and it's a door to a new place. And how did we come about doing this? And I'd like to share that with you because I think it's interesting and I hope there is more that others can do in that area. We started by looking at
12:01
research and working with psychologists on the sense of self and how your sense of self is rooted in your body and the area of psychophysiology, which is essentially the feedback loop between your mind and your body. And who we are is tied up with
12:21
our bodies from the time we are born. When you're a little baby, you first have to find out who you are, what space do you take, how do you interact with stuff. Your body changes with time, sometimes radically. You're still yourself, not
12:40
quite the same person, but your sense of self changes with your body. Your sense of self and your body are not always completely in tune. It's a complicated process. For those that might have issues with anorexia,
13:01
for example, their sense of their body is quite perverted and it's a complex psychological and physiological mechanism who they are and who they think they are. And because it's such an amazing area, there is a lot of experiments people are working to understand how our sense of self
13:22
comes to be from how our body is, our perception and our interoception. And there is a really cool experiment that affected a lot of what we're doing that I'd like to talk to you about. You might have seen it. It's called the rubber hand illusion. So what you do in this experiment, you put the subject on a
13:43
table and they have their real hand somewhere behind a screen that they cannot see. And in front of them, instead, they have a fake hand. And what the experimenter does is that the experimenter caresses both the real hand and the fake hand exactly the
14:02
same way. And something amazing happens. After about two minutes, your body starts disconnecting your real hand and adopting the fake one that you know very well is fake. If somebody were to hit the fake hand, people recoil, expending in pain. It's
14:22
an autonomic system response. Your real hand, the temperature drops. Your body literally disconnects your real hand and adopts the new one. How can that happen? How can you think that a blob is your hand? Well, what's
14:41
behind this is actually an amazing mechanism, multi-sensor integration. So a classic example of multi-sensor integration is when you're out in the street and you know which car is honking. You hear a car honking and you can point to which one it is that is honking. If you think about it, this is very complicated. You look
15:00
at cars. You hear cars. How do you combine those senses to point to which car it is that is honking? This is a very complex process. And that process actually gets perverted, if you like, when you do things like the rubber hand illusion. Your eyes
15:20
see a hand where you would normally see your hand. Your touch, your senses feel the touch exactly the right way. And so the process starts integrating what you feel and what you see the wrong way. Now, these
15:42
things clearly can't be used to change how you feel, to change who you think you are. And these were the what we were experimenting with when we were doing this work. So we did start indeed with the rubber hand illusion and looking at how to embed a changed sense of self in
16:02
technology. But in this process, we also came upon the importance of rhythm and of the heartbeat. And this is actually what Dopple looked like when we started. An Arduino with a bunch of duct tape around it. And
16:22
we did put it on people and realised that actually it did affect how they felt in a very simple way. In that it was really easy to integrate in what they were doing. We did a lot of testing. We first
16:41
started testing where to put it. And that's how we discovered that actually it's important that you would put it where you would normally feel your heartbeat. So it's important it's your heartbeat. If you put it on your knee, it doesn't work. So there's a few places in the body where it does. Here is one. Here is another one. Near your heart is one. We settled
17:01
for this because near your head, it actually kind of starts to vibrate a bit with your skull. And here people found it a bit too intense. Plus it's a little hard to have a control there. So this was the place for us to go to. And then we made dozens and dozens
17:22
of rigs and we got hundreds of people through our website to do alpha testing. And just send it out and see what it is that they said. And they liked it. And they used it for a lot of different things. And we would get feedback like I run really well today or I really concentrated with what I was doing and I'm usually
17:40
nervous with when my boss is around but I was able to deal with it better and I didn't use Facebook as much today. It was really interesting what people would tell us or it helped me go to sleep. It helped me wind down. And as I said then, we also did the tests I already talked about. And
18:02
after they came in, and these were independent control trials, we knew we were in business, literally. And of course being of the making persuasion, we started making lots of them. And there were lots of iterations of the design leading to the product that we now have out. And we had a Kickstarter
18:23
campaign last summer which went very well. So that was the next stage of finding out what people want to do with it. And it's now being manufactured in China and we will be launching it properly in the autumn. So this is our journey at this point.
18:43
And we now have spent a lot of time thinking about the sense of self and technology and where wearables are and where wearables should be going. And for now these are our working rules on the new generation of wearables. So
19:01
what do we think they should do? Well they need to earn their place on your body. If what your wearable does can be done with your phone, it should not be a wearable. If it is striking how you've moved, it can be done with your phone. It does not have to be a wearable. So Dopple has to be on your body because it's about an actuator
19:20
that affects your body. It has to be on your body. So there has to be serious respect about what should be on your body and what shouldn't be. It should not demand your attention if it doesn't need to. Our attention is very precious. And any kind of technology you make had better respect that. You should also respect your intention. Yes,
19:43
because I don't want to overload my attention. I do want my technology to simplify my choices. But this has to be done wisely and in a way that we have agreed to at the right moment in our engagement with the technology. It
20:01
should be beautiful. It's on me. It enhances my life. It should be beautiful. And it should be as natural as possible. Because what is natural on us is already quite amazing. And using what is natural can be very rich and very powerful. And I do think
20:24
that a lot of really interesting things are coming up in this area. I do think that wearables 2.0 is on its way. And we do see some examples of that around here today. And this is what I would like to share and have your feedback. Thank you.
21:09
That was wonderful. Thank you. I'm curious, did you test out both wrists? And did you find that it was helpful to just have one wrist? Or did that not matter? It works on both wrists. We do have
21:23
for some reason we start using it on the left. And stayed on the left. But, you know, the scientist in me says that we have not actually seen a significant difference between the two wrists. Thanks for your presentation.
21:43
You've shown a picture of different moods. Can you heal depressions with your device? No, this device is not sensing. The expectation is that you will feel and then you can use the
22:02
device to change how you feel. And this is something, I mean, this raises a very interesting question because we have been asked many times, can you sense mood and then do what you need to do? Because we are about what you do. We are not about sensing. And
22:25
this is a tricky area because there are some things that you could sense about behavior and about mood. But some of the reasons behind those rules that we
22:41
are grappling with is about the sensing and what is it that you would be doing if you were to tell somebody how do you feel? For example, I can think of a wearable that tracks your sleep and how you've been behaving recently. And based on that, it gives you a score for the upcoming day. So the score for today is going to
23:01
be 70. That's your readiness level today. Now, that clearly will affect how you will behave today. And so sensing comes with a certain responsibility. And when it comes to mood, that responsibility has to be thought through. Yes. Have you tested
23:31
this or have you tried it with patients with chronic pain? We've been told several times we should. And we do we are working with doctors that are
23:41
setting up a trial for that. So we haven't done it yet. There is quite a few trials like that that are coming up. Thanks. Thank you very much. I'm just a little confused because I'm rather critical towards all
24:02
kinds of technology and especially what is on my body. And you're saying that we're surrounded by so many things and so many things are influencing us in our daily life. Plus, then I have a device on my wrist that influences of how I feel. Shouldn't we be able to control our feelings or be able to
24:21
calm ourselves down in a natural way rather than having another technological device on our wrist that tells us how to feel? Ideally, yes, we should be able to calm ourselves down. But most of us find that difficult. So I would be more nervous on stage
24:42
than without it. And there isn't very much I can do about it because I've had a fairly long life before this came along and it's not as if I didn't try. So the I guess a question for technology is that can it make us
25:04
achieve certain things in an easier way? And is that easier way still valid? So, for example, if you were to practice meditation, you would be better at controlling how you feel. But most of us will try and we'll find that it's quite demanding and we'll drop it and it won't happen.
25:22
And then we will turn to other ways of controlling your mood, like a glass of wine or a cup of coffee or whatever it is that we do. So technology can actually step in and do things for you that might be possible in a natural way but too hard for most of us to do. And as long as
25:42
it does it in a way that respects who you are, I think I'm happy with that. Thank you. But isn't that like basically the point that technology makes everything just so much easier? I mean, in a way, we were able to find our way without a smartphone. Now we use the smartphone for every single step. And you're
26:02
saying it's possible to calm you down with meditation, but for most people it's too hard to do. If something's too hard to do and I have a technological opportunity to solve this problem, I choose the easier way. Aren't you afraid that people will drop easier on these
26:21
challenges and take the easy technological way? No, I actually like technology and I like the way technology makes my life easier. I like picking up new things that make things easier for me. I don't walk everywhere. I do use technological devices that move me around. And I
26:42
like new stuff and what we make. I don't like something that tells me whether I'm tired because that seems to be crossing a line. But no, if it can make my life easier in a way that I accept and I'm happy with and I know what's happened and I'm happy.
27:02
Thank you very much. Hi. Do you think your device has the ability to, for example, make people respond in a more positive way when you, for example, show them a video that is supposed to create compassion?
27:21
Let's say you show people a video about animal cruelty. Do you think your advice could make people benefit in terms of their reaction? I don't know because I haven't tried it. I haven't showed videos to people. You're right that what I was talking about, for example, what you
27:41
do with the rubber hand illusion, the next experiments that people normally do, is look at empathy. And your empathy towards other people changes when you're touched in certain ways. So one interesting experiment exactly along the lines of what you're talking about is a variation of the rubber hand illusion where you are
28:01
watching somebody in a computer screen and you are caressed in your face the same way as you see them being caressed and after a while you actually start thinking that you look like them, which is an increase, a sign of increased empathy. So it's true that those mechanisms are all interrelated.
28:21
I have not tested people in front of the video. Can you hear me? Perfect. I have a question regarding placebo effect. Have you tested during your R&D phase
28:40
if there is basically a placebo effect? Well, a lot of why we wanted the independent testing that was done at Royal Holloway was for the placebo effect. So that was a controlled trial. So it did test for placebo and statistics were done correctly. So we know the effect is not a placebo effect. And that was super important for us because we were not going
29:01
to put our lives on a placebo effect. Having said that, placebo is very important and very strong and when you're a designer you want to use it. So knowing that the core of it is not a placebo effect, then the interactions that we put on it are
29:22
such that you relate to it in the natural way. So, for example, to calm it down you caress it and to get going you'll do this and it will remind you what it is for. Now this is not exactly placebo but you are integrating your mental side into what it actually does anyway.
29:45
Yeah, funnily I had the same question. Maybe because you're sitting next to me. Yeah, probably. Whatever. Mirror, Neurors. But I'm just going to extend how well, I mean, if I get you correctly, what the thing is doing, you choose a beat,
30:01
you choose out of, I don't know, like 10 beats, how big is the distinguishment between the beats? Like, I mean, you're running a beat right now, right? Yeah. What if you just chose another beat? Like how big statistically or, you know, does that make a real deal or have you been testing that? It depends on the person. So some people are sensitive and some super sensitive to the details and
30:21
others are not. So there is one thing that seems to be generic across. So when you get the device you use the app to calibrate your resting heart rate. So just about everybody finds the resting heart rate or around there the calming place to be. Essentially if it beats at your resting heart rate, something in your mind tells you that everything is okay. There's
30:42
nothing bad going on. But then, for example, on the high, it's interesting that 120, which is also the disco beat, seems to be a pretty common beat that people like to get going. But, you know, even my own behavior with this, I
31:03
started with fast and strong and over the two years I've been using it, I found that I can actually get the effect I want with a much subtler rhythm. So just to finish up because I've been doing studies on this
31:21
concept of sensation seeking. Have you heard of that? Okay, then I'm just going to talk to you. Yeah, I'd love to know. Thanks. Thank you.