Main Content
Highlights
Refining distant connections
It’s difficult being a parent when you are living 10,000km from home. But for Liping Shen, her unique apartment in southern England provides the technology to keep an eye on her two-year-old son back home in Shanghai. The technology and Ms Shen’s own research are aimed at making the emotional side of remote living considerably more comfortable.
Ms Shen, an IT researcher from Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University is the first resident to live in Essex University’s “future technology home”, iDorm2. As can be seen, one of the walls of iDorm2 is fitted with a digital picture frame and a similar digital frame has been set up at her home in Shanghai.
Not only does the equipment allow her to exchange photos in real time with her husband and son, but also talk “live” on a video link. “By sharing the pictures I can imagine their lives in Shanghai and feel connected with them,” she said.
But Ms Shen admits the picture frame did cause her son some initial confusion. “The first time, he was very excited to see me but he wanted to touch me and to embrace me and asked me to do up his shoes.”
That side of distant emotional response is more difficult to overcome—but Ms Shen is working on it. In fact it is her main reason for being in Essex. She is an IT specialist in distance education and is a specialist in “emotion detection technology”. Essex University has developed an “emotion jacket” which measurers the wearer’s emotional state through heart rate, blood pressure and skin resistance.
“In a traditional classroom, teachers are able to recognise the emotional status of their students and respond in ways that positively impact on learning,” she says. “With remote learners, emotional information is missing.” The jacket could help solve the problem.
