Heart Rate-Based Emotion Recognition and Adaptive Emotion Regulation Support with Wrist-Worn Wearables: A Systematic Literature Review

Emotion regulation (ER) is a key skill since emotions play an essential role in personal development and in understanding social interaction. However, ER is unequally developed in humans and many are searching for ways to improve it. Neuro-adaptive systems bear a large potential for support in this endeavour with adaptive ER support based on biosignal. With the widespread use of wrist-worn wearables, new opportunities are emerging to capture biosignals, such as heart rate (HR), from the wearer in everyday life. This opens up the potential to use wrist-worn wearables to provide adaptive ER support. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in research on HR-based adaptive ER support with wrist-worn wearables. Specifically, we focus on the interplay between emotion recognition, wrist-worn wearables and adaptive ER support. Our findings show that HR-based wrist-worn wearable systems equally intervene via forms of feedback and external regulation by others and only four studies actually adapt the system. Further, many studies focus on response-based regulation or situation modification or selection strategies. To further research, we see research gaps in the ease of application of technical implementation, including biosignal processing and the use of ER support in systems.