Feeling-the-Beat: Enhancing Empathy and Engagement during Public Speaking through Heart Rate Sharing

Public speaking experts intentionally take their audience on an emotional roller coaster, staying attuned to their audience’s collective emotional feedback. In this research, we explore how bidirectional sharing of heart rates between a speaker and their audience facilitates this emotional exchange, through empathy, emotional awareness, and engagement. Firstly, in two design studies (N=25), we evaluated this concept and identified design elements for a heart rate sharing interface. Subsequently, we developed Feeling-the-Beat, a system for sharing heart rate between speakers and audiences in real time. Finally, in a randomized, counter-balanced, within-subjects study (N=36), we compared our system to one sharing fabricated heart rates and a baseline system without heart rate sharing. Feeling-the-Beat significantly increased audience empathy towards the speaker, audience engagement during moments of heightened speaker heart rate, and social presence.