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

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.