Emba: A Wearable System to Enhance Emotional Connection between Couples during Pregnancy

Pregnancy is a long and complicated process physically. During this time, expectant fathers are vitally important to the success of the baby; however, partners rarely get a chance to develop a level of comfort and companionship with their ego, for all too often, the partners do not understand the baby sufficiently to sustain a satisfactory emotional connection. In an attempt to improve the embodied experiences of pregnancy and reinforce the feeling of mutual companionship in remote times, this paper presents Emba: an emotionally informed interactive belt that seeks to create emotional relationships among expectant parents. The belt monitors the pregnant state from its side and will adjust its inflation depending on that and give auditory, visual, and tactile feedback to both sides. We evaluated Emba as a facilitator for remote interactions and emotional bonds based on interviews with three couples, where we used embodied and multimodal feedback. In this paper, we explore Emba's novel tactile interaction and physiological sensing with an eye on how this might aid in the emotional transmission and connection abilities of smart devices.