Emotion-Aware Sleep Support System for Children

Project Overview

This project explores a conceptual emotion-aware system designed to reduce nighttime fear in children aged 3–8. The system detects emotional distress using physiological and behavioural signals and responds with calming augmented reality experiences. A companion parent app provides insights into the child’s emotional state, supporting collaborative comfort rather than passive monitoring. The focus was on interaction design, system architecture, and affective computing integration rather than full technical implementation.

Goals

• Detect fear and anxiety in real time

• Deliver adaptive AR calming interventions

• Improve sleep quality and emotional regulation

• Provide parents with meaningful emotional insights

Process

The project followed a research-driven HCI approach. I studied affective computing, child sleep psychology, and multimodal emotion recognition before developing system flows, storyboards, and interaction scenarios. I then designed conceptual prototypes of the parent dashboard and AR experience to demonstrate how sensing, AI interpretation, and AR feedback would work together.

Challenges

A key challenge was balancing accurate emotion detection with child comfort and privacy. The system needed to avoid intrusive monitoring while reducing false detections. A multimodal sensing strategy and privacy-first design approach helped address these concerns.

Outcome

The project demonstrates how affective computing and AR can create emotionally responsive environments. It highlights system-level UX thinking, multimodal interaction design, and ethical AI integration, showing how emerging technologies can support emotional wellbeing beyond traditional interfaces.