Tung Wah Assisted Therapy

2022 

Enhancing Communication and Well-being for SEN Families Through Objective Emotion Monitoring

No. of Participants:	4 Families (children and parents)
​Nature of Event:	Workshop
Products Used:	Upmood Mass/Insight
Metrics Collected:	Mood, Stress Level, Valence Level, HRV

---

Introduction

Tung Wah Group of Hospitals (TWGHs) is a charitable organization in Hong Kong, dedicated to providing a wide range of medical, educational, and social welfare services to the community. The Long Love Integrated Family Service Centre, a key part of TWGHs, focuses on strengthening family bonds and promoting holistic well-being within the community. Recognizing the unique challenges faced by families with children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in expressing and understanding emotions, TWGHs partnered with Upmood to integrate objective emotion monitoring into a specialized yoga and therapy workshop.

This collaboration aimed to provide a supportive environment for SEN children and their parents, using yoga as a medium to foster connection and emotional awareness. The primary goal was to leverage emotion monitoring to objectively assess emotional states, particularly for children who might struggle with verbal communication, and to provide parents with tangible insights into their family's emotional dynamics. By moving beyond subjective observations, Upmood’s technology played a crucial role in validating the workshop's effectiveness and identifying areas for improvement in group participation and communication.

Workshop Design and Upmood Integration 

The engagement involved a workshop specifically designed for SEN children and their parents. Families participated in a joint yoga session, where both children and parents wore Upmood bands to continuously track their real-time emotional responses. Following the yoga, parents attended a separate therapy appointment. During the yoga segment, Upmood Mass was utilized for seamless group monitoring, allowing facilitators to observe the collective emotional atmosphere. Simultaneously, Upmood bands collected individual physiological data, including Heart Rate Variability (HRV), which was then analyzed by Upmood Insight to provide detailed emotional trends. This real-time, objective data offered immediate insights into emotional shifts during the physical activity and guided interactions, providing a new dimension to understanding family dynamics.

Why Upmood? 

Upmood’s real-time emotion monitoring capabilities were indispensable for this project, particularly in addressing the challenge of assessing emotions in individuals with communication difficulties. The ability to objectively track and quantify emotional states (mood, stress, valence) provided invaluable insights that traditional subjective feedback methods could not capture. Upmood Mass offered a practical solution for monitoring the overall emotional climate of the group, while Upmood Insight delivered granular analytics of individual emotional trends. This objective data empowered parents and therapists to gain a clearer understanding of emotional responses, facilitating more open discussions during therapy sessions and enabling the identification of specific strengths and areas for improvement in group participation.

Key Outcomes and Findings

The integration of Upmood's emotion monitoring technology yielded significant positive outcomes for the participating families:

• Enhanced Parental Openness: 100% of parents were more willing to open up about their experiences during therapy sessions after reviewing their objective emotion results, demonstrating how data can facilitate self-reflection and communication.

• Objective Validation of Calmness: 100% of parents reported feeling calm during guided spoken meditation segments, providing strong validation for the effectiveness of the workshop's methodology and content in inducing positive emotional states.

• Identified Group Dynamics: The emotion data helped parents objectively identify areas of strength and improvement for group participation, offering concrete insights into family interactions during the workshop.

Conclusion

The collaboration between Tung Wah Group of Hospitals Long Love Integrated Family Service Centre and Upmood successfully demonstrated the profound impact of objective emotion monitoring in enhancing emotional well-being and fostering deeper understanding within families, especially those with SEN children. By integrating Upmood's technology into therapeutic workshops, TWGHs was able to provide data-driven support, validate intervention methodologies, and empower parents with a clearer, more objective understanding of their children's and their own emotional journeys. This project highlights Upmood's potential to offer deep, measurable insights into emotional states, enabling organizations to deliver more effective, personalized, and impactful wellness and support programs for vulnerable populations.

Thank you!

Thank you to Tung Wah Group of Hospitals Long Love Integrated Family Service Centre for their pioneering support in this innovative approach to family and individual wellness.

If you're interested in conducting your own emotion-driven wellness program or trying out Upmood products, please send us an email at support@upmood.com.