Wearable systems without experiential disruptions: exploring the impact of device feedback changes on explicit awareness, physiological synchrony, sense of agency, and device-body ownership

Abstract

Technologies on the body that require explicit awareness to be operated or monitored often risk disrupting human awareness and induce stress and excessive cognitive load. With the increasing interest in body-centric technologies, it is thus essential to understand how to build technologies that interface with human awareness without disrupting or requiring too many cognitive resources. In this paper, we build and evaluate a wearable system that uses different feedback types to alter human awareness (of the device). We further demonstrate how this awareness impacts cognitive load, sense of body-ownership, and sense of agency, which are often essential antecedents to successful and continued use. Moreover, we further investigate physiological signals, such as physiological synchrony, as well as qualitative reports in a multimodal analysis. Our results show that devices that provide feedback that deviate from expected behavior tend to generate higher amounts of explicit awareness, and that such increased awareness correlates with increased cognitive load, lower sense of agency and lower sense of body-ownership. Moreover, we find that interoceptive acuity correlates with diminished sense of agency. We discuss their implications for designing wearable body-centric systems that induce or disrupt different levels of awareness to deliver or diminish a sense of body-ownership and agency over the system.