Catch that butterfly: A Multimodal Approach for Detecting and Simulating Gut Feelings

Gut feelings are an omnipresent sensation underlying many emotional experiences, ranging from positive to negative emotions and even sixth sense intuition. Predicting and stimulating these feelings can enhance and enrich users’ emotional experiences. Despite the tremendous potential of gut feelings for HCI design, gut-related signals have been largely ignored in HCI research. In this paper, we introduce an ongoing prototype of an artifact that utilizes both bowel sounds and electrogastrography (EGG) signals to predict and simulate gut feelings. Our prototype consists of an EGG sensing module, a bowel sound sensing module, a machine learning model to process and predict gut-churning moments, and a feedback mechanism to simulate gut feelings in the abdominal area. We hope this work opens up a new design space for physiological signal-based interaction and offers novel opportunities for enhancing user experiences. For future work, we plan to build a robust dataset for gut feeling prediction and evaluate our artifact’s effectiveness in inducing gut feelings in real users.