There are numerous apps, gadgets, and services available today that helps us keep track of our activities, lose weight, get fit, or sleep better.  But some researchers claim that these quantified self trackers will provide even more meaningful data if they’re able to track a person’s emotions.

For example, you are sad because you broke up with your significant other, or something unfortunate happens.  You go to the fridge to indulge in a tub of ice cream.  But your smartwatch senses you’re sad, alerting you to your emotional decision to break the diet it’s also helping you track and manage. From there your smartphone could also suggest going for a run, as endorphins, released when you engage in physical activity, can boost overall mood to happier levels.

Apps and gadgets today “learn” from your activities and input.  Some sensors on smartwatches or bracelets already detect if a person is perspiring too much, or track changes in body temperature throughout the day.  When a person feels something, like being happy, angry, sad, the body reacts differently.  So when a person is happy, the bracelet could take note of your heart rate, respiratory rate, sweat production, etc.  The accompanying app then asks you what you’re feeling.  So you input “happy.”  The more emotions you experience, the better the bracelet and the app gets to know you.  It also takes note of your current activity and surroundings, so the next time you feel the same emotion it can make environmentally aware suggestions like hang out with certain friends, visiting your favorite museum, or taking a long drive up the coast.

The whole point of quantified self is to get to know yourself better so you can change behavior accordingly.  Emotions act as another dimension to contextualize available data collected by sensors and such, resulting in a better sense of how to improve yourself.  In tracking your emotions, you’ll know what activities upset you, what makes you happy, what relieves stress, and so on.

There are already some services and apps that helps people track emotions — not many gadgets in this sector specific for the self-quantified fans.  Mood trackers not only help you get a better sense of yourself, but could also help you make the right decisions in life.

Moodscope

Moodscope is an online service that is available in free and paid versions.  The free version lets you track your daily mood by using mood cards.  It comes with 20 emotions such as scared, enthusiastic, alert or nervous, and for each you have to choose between extremely, a little, very slightly or not at all, and quite a bit.

Daily results are plotted in a graph, and you can add further context by describing each dot.  By adding comments, you will have a better sense of what affects your mood, and in turn you can do something to change that.

You can also share your results with your nominated friends via email, who will act as your support group through encouragement.

Ginger.io

Ginger.io uses Big Data to better connect patients and healthcare providers.  Individuals install either an Android or iOS app on their device, which use data from your phone to monitor your current state.  If it senses that something is wrong, it contacts your healthcare provider immediately.

With Ginger.io, healthcare providers get real-time self-report and sensor information from patients.  Data can be accessed anywhere, so it’s easy to see if something changed and you can easily reach out to your patient.  Everything shared on Ginger.io is safe and secure and you determine what data you want to share.

Track Your Happiness

This iOS app is pretty easy to use.  When you run Track Your Happiness, it will ask you a few questions for statistical purposes.  After that, you will get either an email or text message asking you how you’re feeling, how you’re doing, and who you are with.  You determine when and how often you get the notifications.  You will then get a Happiness Report, which shows you how your happiness varies depending on what you are doing, who you are with, where you are, what time of day it is, and a variety of other factors.

The point of the app is to help you determine what makes you happy, ultimately convincing you to keep doing things that make you happy so you will live a better and fuller life.

MercuryApp

This app was created by Sarah Gray for her own purposes while she was in a long-distance relationship.  Though the relationship was great, she and her partner were having a hard time deciding which of them should move so they can be together.  With the use of the app, she tracked her feelings for two months and the results surprised her.  She was not as happy about the relationship as she previously thought.  She ended up ending the relationship.

Just think – if she’d made the decision to move, she might’ve regretted doing so.  We’ve all heard the sound advice of not making decisions when you’re emotional.  With apps like this, you can datify emotions in order to make better decisions, aware, but independent of, emotional turmoil.

Beyond Verbal

This startup company recently raised $2.8 million in seed funding, now pioneering Emotions Analytics.  It is a new field that focuses on identifying and analyzing the full spectrum of human emotions and personality.  Beyond Verbal aims to introduce Emotions Analytics into voice-capable applications and devices to enable machines to understand who we are, how we feel and what we really mean.  This initiative could help in fusing emotion data with the concepts underlying the quantified self, and give birth to devices that understand our frustrations, able to suggest things that would help alleviate that negative feeling.

photo credit: drurydrama (Len Radin) via photopin cc