Tell tale heart/Stress network

The Tell Tale Hearts / Stress Network projects are based around the idea of shared biometric data.

The basis of social/mental sharing is the implicit facility to interpolate the current state of another. To understand fear we remember our own fear. This is not done by recalling a visual or auditory trigger, it is the regurgitation of stored bioprocesses.

When scared our bodies transform into fear. Our metabolism rises, our GI tract dumps acid into our stomach and our perceptional machine gives a different meaning to reality.

To speak fear we recognize and join these processes in real time, mimicking the prior situation with linked sounds (speech).

To hear fear we can only listen with our own.

To have functioning groups and personal corporations, the ability to understand ones state in terms of that group is key. Over the millennia, this functioning has been built into our biological processes through evolution. Human communication has therfore gathered around the "close proximity" interactions of the body. The structure of that interface has been taken care of for us in many instances; hormones dictate common menstrual cycles and aggression behaviors, facial expressions dictate shared emotional judgment ect., without our explicit consent. But with the extension of self through our various technological bases (phones,the written word, electricity) many subconscious tools are lost, creating a uninformed vacuum of self. To try and bridge that gap and keep our technological advancements in sync with our communicative tools, a more inclusive method has to be worked out. more thinking.

The ability to transfer your biometric rhythms to another is limited (you can not give stomach acid or raise another's hormone levels easily). When in selected settings a wider amount of information can be transfered (when sleeping close to someone your heart rates and body temp tend to come into sync) but is restricted by space and instance.There's got to be a better way.

With the Tell Tale Hearts project we made a device which allows you to be implicitly in contact with the bio/mental state of another individual. Making a constant communicative link without the need for many levels of interpretation, or of a standardized social meaning.

Operation:
The device polls the heart beat of the wearer using an IR sensor. The heart beat is then sent to the second device wirelessly(xbee) where it is used to control the on/off cycle of a vibrating motor (like a cell phone vibration). On the second device the same cycle occurs with the polling and sending of the heart rate. In this way the users keep a constant link to the others bio state (shown below are the possible send/receive combinations).

Findings: after a time if no great external pressures occur the heart rates tend to average in toward the rhythm of the motor.

The Stress NetworK is a closely related project devised by myself that connects a groups combined stress or relaxation level. To do this the device polls the heart rate and galvanic skin response of the user and formulates a "stress" reading from it. Every 2 seconds it takes the "stress" reading and transfers it to a linked device/person in the group. Each persons stress level is linked out to one person in the group for the duration of the connection. The output of the device is never sent to the device that is giving input (except with two people, the DAISY configuration). This creates a full loop. When the stress reading arrives at the linked device it becomes the basis of a tactile or auditory output to the recipient. As the "stress" level increases from the sender the output to the recipient increases, raising the sound level or increasing the shock. In this way the recipient is directly and non semantically influenced by the physical state of the other. The combined effect of this linking is to have the group calm down or get stressed out together. I need to do further testing.

Operation:
The device polls the heart beat of the wearer using an ir sensor and gets the galvanic data. The data is then sent to the second device wirelessly(xbee) where it is used to control the output of that device, raising or lowering the shock/auditory level. This influences the recipients physical stress level which is then transmitted to the next individual. On the device are two leds one that shows your heart rate as a blinking light with your individual color and the other glows the color of the sender that you are receiving from.