Connecting Youth Through Affective, Mobile Games

We describe booST and hooPS, two applications targeted toward the youth demographic. These mobile, social applications are designed with the goals of promoting health and wellbeing by engendering and strengthening social relationships among youth. What makes booST and hooPS stand out is that they exhibit sensitivity to their user’s emotional state and support the user in exchanging that state with other users. In this manner, these applications demonstrate how representing and reasoning about emotions can facilitate deeper relationships that promote desirable behaviors and attitudes. We also describe a novel middleware, Koko, upon which booST and hooPS are built, and which facilitates building other such applications.