Masque is a psychoacoustic system that manipulates the user’s perception of their own respiration by providing false auditory feedback. By deliberately misrepresenting the wearer’s sense of their own breathing, Masque can cause bias in behavioral and cognitive experiences without any explicit instructions or stimuli. Users hear synchronized respiration sound from Masque as their own and react naturally to the synthetic body signals.

Masque uses a digital temperature sensor chip (TSY01, TE Connectivity) for its fast data acquisition and high resolution (0.1°C) to sense respiration. The sensor measures the temperature right in front of the nostril at a frequency of 43Hz to detect the exhaling and inhaling activity of the user.  

With high precision and fast speed temperature sensor, Masque detects the user's breathing activities and plays back a mediated breathing sound synchronously through a bone conduction headphone. The mediated breathing sound is real-time synthesized, thus its breathing rate can be modified by the user at any moment.

The design of Masque draws inspiration from Italian carnival masks. For critics of Commedia dell’Arte, there was a direct connection between covering one’s face and hiding one’s heart. The visual language of the mask originates in Cesare Pipa's Compendium Iconologia (1593), where the Fravde is presented as a monstrous two-headed creature. In one hand he holds a flaming, broken heart—in the other, a mask. The visual design implies the inherent tension between self-control and self-disguise in the device.  Making use of its 3D printed, rigid-flexible structure , the design also learnt from Miriam Simun's smelling device for placing the sensing node in front of users' nose. 

Fravde - Cesare Pipa's Compendium Iconologia

Miriam Simun's smelling device

In the end, Xin Liu and industrial designer HongXin (Sean) Zhang landed on this final version that carefully conceals all the electronics—including bone conduction transducer, respiration sensor, and wires—inside a curved structure.

Our Studies

We conducted two user studies on Masque, in which we observed that users easily mistook the false breathing feedback sound as their actual respiration, and showed quantifiable changes in their behaviors in both stress and sexual attraction scenarios. 

Stress Study

In the Stress Study, the participants were asked to work on a GRE test within a shortened duration, before and after which we took their state-trait anxiety scores for comparison. 
We observed a statistically significant difference (p =.048) in terms of changes in anxiety between the groups who heard two different rates of breathing. In other words, those who heard the fast and loud false respiration feedback tended to feel more anxious after the GRE test.

Attraction Study

We recruited twelve heterosexual, male participants in the study. They were each shown fourteen photos (publicly available) of women for 30 seconds and asked to rate each picture on the following characteristics: attractive, exciting, and friendly.

The results showed the misattribution of arousal effect for physical attraction among the participants. They rate the pictures as more attractive when they hear a fast and loud respiration sound "from themselves."

The detailed study descriptions and results can be found in the chapter five of Xin Liu's master thesis: Inward to Outward. 

Masque presents a technical solution consisting of a psychoacoustic wearable interface that provides false feedback of respiratory signals and has an effect on cognitive performance. It forms a basis for a larger effort to design a body signal feedback system that changes how we perceive and connect with ourselves. By alternating various feedback patterns, we can foresee the potential of false feedback technology in areas such as emotion regulation, self-awareness, and wellbeing.