The Distant Heart: Mediating Long-Distance Relationships through Connected Computational Jewelry

TL;DR

This paper explores how computational jewelry can serve as a new medium to enhance long-distance relationships by acting as a tangible, wearable connection that evokes presence and emotional closeness.

Contribution

It investigates the potential of jewelry-like computational devices to mediate and strengthen long-distance personal relationships, filling a gap in existing communication technologies.

Findings

Jewelry form factor enhances emotional connection in long-distance relationships.

Computational jewelry evokes presence and emotional closeness.

Prototype studies show positive effects on relationship perception.

Abstract

In the world where increasingly mobility and long-distance relationships with family, friends and loved-ones became commonplace, there exists a gap in intimate interpersonal communication mediated by technology. Considering the advances in the field of mediation of relationships through technology, as well as prevalence of use of jewelry as love-tokens for expressing a wish to be remembered and to evoke the presence of the loved-one, developments in the new field of computational jewelry offer some truly exciting possibilities. In this paper we investigate the role that the jewelry-like form factor of prototypes can play in the context of studying effects of computational jewelry in mediating long-distance relationships.