GalvaPhone was inspired by another project I have been working on, called EMotoPhone. EMotoPhone allows cell phone users to choose a face manually, representing their current emotion, and send it over a cell phone to another user. The recipient of the EMotoPhone face can then decide whether to accept a phone call from the sender. By first receiving the face, the recipient already has an idea of the nature of the phone call before he even decides whether to answer the phone. The EMotoPhone face gives the potential incoming phone call more context.

So what is the problem with EMotoPhone? Well, the emotions on EMotoPhone are all self-reported. EMotoPhone users can try to deceive the recipients by choosing misleading faces, perhaps in order to entice recipients to answer a call that they would otherwise ignore. I wanted to add another component to EMotoPhone that could automatically sense something about the user's current state, and send this information over the phone, in addition to the user's self-reported emotion. I just needed to come up with a way to do this.