A development team in Amsterdam have created a perfumed necklace that reminds users to keep their posture in check with a pleasant fragrance.
Based on collaborative research between Kyushu University, Copenhagen Institute and University of Amsterdam, PosturAroma was commissioned by Cisco and built by MediaLAB Amsterdam. It's designed to keep the wearer's back straight as they walk, improving posture, mood and self-esteem all in one go, releasing fragrances to trigger more confident behaviour. Perfumes come in strawberry, neroli, mandarin peel, pheromones, vanilla, apple, alcohol, lemon grass and cappuccino, and because the link between the sense of smell and memory is so strong, there could be social benefits to such an experiment.
A driving force behind the project was to encourage a confident walk, which, in theory, would improve the wearer's sense of safety. In a research paper, it was asserted that while many women feel uncomfortable walking past loiterers, only four percent of those interviewed ever encountered actual problems. The purpose of this project, then, seems to be to improve the feeling of safety, encouraged through scents that trigger certain emotions and actions, rather than deflecting crime itself.
The necklace may not be the most aesthetically attractive piece of jewellery, but the team are planning to expand the concept. Although just a prototype, more research could be done in exploring correlations between positive and negative connotations with scent and human conditioning.
Taking the stick approach, (rather than the carrot), we recently looked at Ling Tan's Reality Mediators, which punishes users for laziness, sending painful or unpleasant senses to various parts of the body if a lethargic brain function is detected.