Dispositive/suit that codifies and transmits NON CONSCIOUS body information such as: palpitations, sweat, blood pressure, breath rate, eye blinking, etc This information will be gathered and interpreted as affective/repulsion manifestation.
THis dispositive will fit the "Programmable Matter" paradigma: • A programmable material… • …with actuation and sensing… • …that can change its physical properties … • … under software control… • …and in reaction to external stimuli
An X-ray of the suit that Alan B. Shepard wore on the moon during the Apollo 14, mission 1971
The project seeks the augmentation of human experience through wearable physiological technology. It wishes to bring something private, namely our thoughts and emotions, and broadcast them to the world. Especially as much of our daily communication is moving away from face-to-face contact, we need new ways of expressing and transmitting our emotions to our peers.
The project aslo relates to the work of Antonio Damasio who states that "The emotions come before feelings" Emotions are based on internal body environment which act as inputs into the brain, just as visual or auditory information is an input to the brain from the external environment. So the project will try to gather this previous-conscious world to interact with it, in ways yet not developed. Which might go from self-psicoanalisis to performative issues or visualizations.
I started searching ways of monitoring this NON CONSCIOUS body information, such as palpitations, sweat, eye blinkig...
HEART RATE MEASUREMENT: Heart rate measurement indicates the soundness of the human cardiovascular system. This technique measures the heart rate by sensing the change in blood volume in a finger artery while the heart is pumping the blood. It consists of an infrared LED that transmits an IR signal through the fingertip of the subject, a part of which is reflected by the blood cells.
The reflected signal is detected by a photo diode sensor. The changing blood volume with heartbeat results in a train of pulses at the output of the photo diode, the magnitude of which is too small to be detected directly by a microcontroller. Therefore, a two-stage high gain, active low pass filter is designed using two Operational Amplifiers (OpAmps) to filter and amplify the signal to appropriate voltage level so that the pulses can be counted by a microcontroller. In the next picture the heart rate is displayed on a 3 digit seven segment display.
SWEAT SENSOR: Let’s start from the first one, Galvanic Skin Response Sensor or, in short, GSR Sensor, which made its debut with Jung The basic idea behind GSR Sensor is simple (simple enough to be built by LEGO): You sweat unconsciously. Your skin conductance depends on how much you sweat. If you accept both of the arguments, we can conclude that measuring your skin conductance level can let us know how physiologically excited you are.
EYE BLINKIG: This issue looks more complicated, I leave here a couple of approaches: EYE WRITER hacking a Playstation camera
And the fantastic work of Daito Manabe hacking the body!!!
And this is a sketch how this could look like:
