Feelink

Feelink is an emotion-sensing wearable that detects users’ brainwave activity and translates their emotions into interactive game inputs.

It aims to help people transition from online to offline socializing, address well-being challenges, and foster deeper real-world connections.

In today’s digital age, people spend more than 6 hours daily on screens, and though they socialize online for convenience, many feel disconnected and lonely due to the lack of emotional depth in digital interactions. Our primary and secondary research highlighted four key challenges related to this shift: loneliness, unmet expectations, attention deficiency, and anxiety.

Our target users are digitally immersed individuals who rely heavily on online socializing but struggle to build meaningful connections offline — such as social media users, gamers, and chronically online individuals.

We discovered that the core problem is the gap between surface-level online interactions and emotionally meaningful offline connections, and Feelink is designed to bridge this gap by making emotions more visible and shared, especially during social interactions.

The outcome is a wearable paired with an interactive game. The wearable detects EEG brainwave signals in real-time using OpenBCI, classifying emotions into categories such as positive, negative, and calm. The game uses these signals as input, influencing the narrative direction, character development, and player responses. The goal is to help players practice emotional awareness and empathy in a safe, gamified environment.

In the future, Feelink has potential beyond gaming. The wearable can be adapted into other multiplayer environments or integrated into fashion, education, or mental wellbeing settings — helping users understand themselves and others through shared emotional visibility.