Lovable couch: mitigating distrustful feelings for couples by visualizing excitation

Increasing percentage of unmarried individuals in Japan has triggered decline in birth rate. This is partially caused by dominating modern lifestyles that involve long working hours, as well as increasing sex segregation in social interaction. People who are singles have fewer opportunities to build romantic relationships; therefore, speed-dating services have recently become popular. However, challenges still remain in supporting dating interaction especially to determine whether a potential couple feels affection toward each other. Hence, many people feel distrust and anxiety when being approached by a dating partner thus makes them feel hesitate to move forward. In this work, we report our findings that by visualizing excitation aggregated from users' heartbeat changes potentially help users to determine whether their potential partners feel mutual affection during a date. We propose Lovable Couch, an approach to support dating session by visually actuating a sofa with user's excitement measures as a way to mitigate users' anxiety.