Ask HN: Project idea – mood tracker for your online activity

[jasiek-net]

Hi! Inspired by two posts from HN (below) I decided to create a browser extension that tracks your mood when browsing the Internet and shows you which pages improve your well-being and which websites make you down, anxious or addicted.

The project will contain three modules:

1. Mood tracker - gather all info about your emotional state - from physiological data (Apple Health, band wrists etc.) through behavioral data (typing speed, mouse movements) to facial expression recognition (FER)

2. Content analysis - time spent on each website, emotional valence of consumed content, how often does the emotional value of the content change (dopamine swing) etc.

3. Data visualization - for personal use (to see impact of visited websites to your mental health) and also globally by ranking websites by different categories (inspiring, depressing, addictive, creative etc.)

I'm curious what you think about this, maybe you have comments or ideas on how to extend/improve such a project; where are the potential pitfalls and where are the opportunities for development and cooperation.

Thanks!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622404

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935605

[thepablohansen]

Hey! I happen to be building something very similar in my free time- started off as a hackathon project. Feel free to reach out! Only spent around 10 hours on the current deployed iteration but you can check the idea out here- https://www.withtal.com/

[jruohonen]

As an idea, (1) vs. (2) might be interesting, although you cannot deduce about things like dopamine and I doubt whether consumer-grade physical sensors really convey "emotional states". If you do it, open source and open data would be ideal as the idea might fly also as a research topic.

[jasiek-net]

Thanks, it will start as an open source project, as people may be concern about privacy with such as delicate subject. And I do master studies at psychology so it will be research topic at least for me :)

[jruohonen]

Even if it would be spurious, it would be interesting to see whether there is a correlation. (I used to have a Oura ring out of similar interests, but lost it somewhere someday.) Viz newsrooms see also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779439

[jasiek-net]

For me the most interesting part is mood tracking, as many of the psychological methods are based on self-evaluation and here we have an opportunity to gather data real-time without user input.

Glad you came with oura ring as I though about this project as an oura ring for emotional state.