The Hull-based inventor of a wearable emotion tracker has revealed how the device, which began as a solution for her daughter, is set to become a new metric for happiness around the world.
Inspired by her seven-year-old’s struggle in school, Christina Colmer McHugh came up with the idea for the Moodbeam bracelet as a way to see her daughter’s wellbeing ‘live’.
The former PR and journalist, originally from County Down, found that device had wider appeal with fellow parents, providing an easy way for children to log their emotions without the need for a smartphone or a complex emotional vocabulary.
Originally featuring five buttons for a range of emotions, early tests with school children soon revealed that only two were needed. It was that initial test group of young students who picked yellow for happy, and blue for sad.
Launched in 2016, the promise of the device has since found a wide range of new potential users, including adults, and the data collected from these devices is forming an increasingly important metric for people’s emotional state.
