ITPBlog

I made a post about different fabrics that I tried for my prototype. I have decided on using “stretch conductive fabric”. Reasons why I chose it are, my first simple test for galvanic skin response with ”stretch conductive fabric” gave good results, also it is description says that it is a really good conductive material and good for electrodes.

So, I attached two pieces of fabric on a wristband, and I used a lilypad and 300k as resistor.

And this is another image to show how my data represented for now, and how it changes…

Here are 2 videos from my prototype. One with using fingers, one with using wrist. I was taking rapid breaths while I am experimenting to see the change in graph. When I take rapid breaths graph goes up, when ever I give all of my breath out, graph goes down.

Yesterday, I found this project. It is very cool and very close to my idea. I didn’t have chance to read the book yet. However, if you are interested in, here some brief explanations and links to them

http://emotionalcartography.net/
“Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists,
designers, psychogeographers,
cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought
together by Christian Nold, to
explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising
intimate biometric data and
emotional experiences using technology.”

And this is the link for the same project that maps feeling on the
geographical maps of the cities.
http://www.biomapping.net/
“Bio Mapping is revolutionary methodology and tool for visualising
people’s reactions to the external world.
When we become aware of our own and each others unique body reactions
to the environment we can create a better world!”

I have presented my thesis idea few times. There were some questions that I got from my audience. Here are my answers to make them clear.

I will be measuring changes in body during the day, and I will be correlating this with emotional changes.  I can not estimate exact emotion, but I can say, calm, normal, anxious/stresses/anger/happy(these four are almost the same data, because Galvanic Skin Response shows change in your bodies resistance according to amount of sweating)

Problem

I realized, there are sometimes that I cannot control changes in my emotions and loose my temper. After realizing this, I start controlling myself. Whenever I realize there is a change in my emotion, I try to calm down and thing about it again. This helps me to realize if I am doing something wrong or right. So, as a start I see this thing as a screen for myself to realize my feelings and control them. As a start, I am doing this project for myself.

Later on I have different ideas to implement by using the same idea. For example, knowing what effects me in New York, or a driver feelings screen or a genre visualizer.

Sensors

I will be using galvanic skin response to see reactions of your body. You can figure out emotional changes by looking at to resistance between two points on the body. This is effected by the level of sweating.

Also, I want to use heart rate monitor, because seeing changes in the heart rate might be useful or, it might help me to figure out if the changes in galvanic skin response is because of a physical activity.

I will not be using EEG, because EEG interferes with galvanic skin response and even a little movement can effect EEG data. I am designing this product for people to wear in their daily life. So, they will be moving.

Display

I will be using some sort of abstract shapes. Using hight or graphical elements doesn’t seem so well. I am sensing if there is any change in the emotions, not exactly what you are feeling, and also cumulative data. So, using color code seems easy and meaningful for now. Or another option can be using abstract shapes like, if shape has sharp edges that means danger etc.

Private/public

If you don’t want to make this data public (let’s say you are in a grocery store), you can turn it off or unattached the screen. Another option might be having a headphone system, so, you can hear it but people cannot. So, you will be still aware of it and have a chance to change it.

Other possible scenarios

Maybe, some sort of screen for traffic. This can be for personal awareness or for public awareness.

Mapping emotional changes during a movie and instead of calling a genre for the movie calling something related to graphics or colors.

According to wikipedia, Electroencephalography (EEG) is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain. Basically, for EEG, you are looking for electrical activity of your brain by using electrodes. Brainwaves have very low frequency. There are some good projects for EEG like “Open  EEG” or “Emotive”. However, I don’t know how easy and reliable it is.

Also, even a simple eye blinking is interfering with EEG values, for my project, I will be tracking people who are moving. So, there will a lot of inference.

I was talking with another ITP student (Neil Hickey),  he worked on EEG before for his undergrad. I mentioned him that I will be using galvanic skin response with EEG. He mentioned that, galvanic skin response (GSR) would interfere with EEG also.

As a result, I will not be using EEG for my thesis, because my audience will be moving and I will be using GSR which are interfering with EEG.

Here are some images from my prototype that I made earlier..