GutIO

Do emotions create detectable changes in abdominal sounds? Can we use abdominal sounds to in turn influence emotions and gut feelings?

In this project, we explored the potential of abdomial sounds for sensing emotions and inducing gut feelings through 2 studies. In the first study, we induced emotions and gut feelings in users and trained a machine learning model to see if they can pick up the changes create by emotions in abdomial sounds. In the second study, we used abdominal sounds found in clusters in study 1 and created haptic patterns to influence people’s gastric interoception. We found that abdominal sound is a potential new modality for both sensing emotions and influencing gastric interoception. This work set the groundwork for future work to further explore gut-based interaction.

Publications:

Mia Huong Nguyen, Moritz Messerschmidt, Chitralekha Gupta, and Suranga Nanayakkara. 2023. GutIO: Towards Sensing and Inducing Gut-feelings with Abdominal Sounds. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-9. 2025.

Mia Huong Nguyen, Kian Peen Yeo, Yasith Samaradivakara, and Suranga Nanayakkara. “Catch that butterfly: A Multimodal Approach for Detecting and Simulating Gut Feelings.” In Adjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 1-3. 2024.

@inproceedings{emo-know-huongnguyen-2023,
    title = "{GutIO}: Towards Sensing and Inducing Gut-feelings with Abdominal Sounds",
    author = "Nguyen, Mia Huong  and
      Messerschmidt, Moritz  and
      Gupta, Chitralekha  and
      Nanayakkara, Suranga",
    booktitle = "CHI 2025 LBW",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    publisher = "ACM",
    url = "https://drive.google.com/file/d/15cPJjbadMmpkjUw7Rvrvg7voLjObWU3Z/view?usp=sharing",
    doi = "10.1145/3706599.3719826",
}

Fun fact
Do you know that in Vietnamese, emotions are expressed mainly through the gut and not the heart? If someone told you that you have a “good gut”, consider it as a complement, we are telling you that you are very kind :D