Category Archives: Musings

Thoughts, opinions about physiological computing applications both real and imaginary

Big Physiological Data

I attended a short conference event organised by the CEEDs project earlier this month entitled “Making Sense of Big Data.”  CEEDS is an EU-funded project under the Future and Emerging Technology (FET) Initiative.  The project is concerned with the development of novel technologies to support human experience.  The event took place at the Google Campus in London and included a range of speakers talking about the use of data to capture human experience and behaviour.  You can find a link about the event here that contains full details and films of all the talks including a panel discussion.  My own talk was a general introduction to physiological computing and a statement of our latest project work.

It was a thought-provoking day because it was an opportunity to view the area of physiological computing from a different perspective.  The main theme being that we are entering the age of ‘big data’ in the sense that passive monitoring of people using mobile technology grants access to a wide array of data concerning human behaviour.  Of course this is hugely relevant to physiological monitoring systems, which tend towards high-resolution data capture and may represent the richest vein of big data to index the human experience.

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First International Conference on Physiological Computing

If there is a problem for academics working in the area of physiological computing, it can sometimes be a problem finding the right place to publish.  By the right place, I mean a forum that is receptive to multidisciplinary research and where you feel confident that you can reach the right audience.  Having done a lot of reviewing of physiological computing papers, I see work that is often strong on measures/methodology but weak on applications; alternatively papers tend to focus on interaction mechanics but are sometimes poor on the measurement side.  The main problem lies with the expertise of the reviewer or reviewers, who often tend to be psychologists or computer scientists and it can be difficult for authors to strike the right balance.

For this reason, I’m writing to make people aware of The First International Conference on Physiological Computing to be held in Lisbon next January.  The deadline for papers is 30th July 2013.  A selected number of papers will be published by Springer-Verlag as part of their series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.  The journal Multimedia Tools & Applications (also published by Springer) will also select papers presented at the conference to form a special issue.  There is also a special issue of the journal Transactions in Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) on physiological computing that is currently open for submissions, the cfp is here and the deadline is 20th December 2013.

I should also plug a new journal from Inderscience called the International Journal of Cognitive Performance Support which has just published its first edition and would welcome contributions on brain-computer interfaces and biofeedback mechanics.

Troubleshooting and Mind-Reading: Developing EEG-based interaction with commercial systems

With regards to the development of physiological computing systems, whether they are BCI applications or fall into the category of affective computing, there seems (to me) to be two distinct types of research community at work. The first (and oldest) community are university-based academics, like myself, doing basic research on measures, methods and prototypes with the primary aim of publishing our work in various conferences and journals. For the most part, we are a mixture of psychologists, computer scientists and engineers, many of whom have an interest in human-computer interaction. The second community formed around the availability of commercial EEG peripherals, such as the Emotiv and Neurosky. Some members of this community are academics and others are developers, I suspect many are dedicated gamers. They are looking to build applications and hacks to embellish interactive experience with a strong emphasis on commercialisation.

There are many differences between the two groups. My own academic group is ‘old-school’ in many ways, motivated by research issues and defined by the usual hierarchies associated with specialisation and rank. The newer group is more inclusive (the tag-line on the NeuroSky site is “Brain Sensors for Everyone”); they basically want to build stuff and preferably sell it.

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Reflections on Body Lab

Way back in February, Kiel and I did an event called Body Lab in conjunction with our LJMU colleagues at OpenLabs.  The idea for this event originated in a series of conversations between ourselves and OpenLabs about our mutual interest in digital health. The brief of OpenLabs is to “support local creative technology companies to develop new products and services that capitalise upon global opportunities.”  Their interest in our work on physiological computing was to put this idea out among their community of local creatives and digital types.

I was initially apprehensive about wisdom of this event. I’m quite used to talking about our work with others from the research community, from both the commercial and academic side – what makes me slightly uncomfortable is talking about possible implementations because I feel the available sensor apparatus and other tools are not so advanced.  I was also concerned about whether doing a day-long event on this topic would pull in a sufficient number of participants – what we do has always felt very “niche” in my view.  Anyhow, some smooth-talking from Jason Taylor (our OpenLabs contact) and a little publicity in the form of this short podcast convinced that we should give it our best shot.

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Moodscope, subjective ratings and body blogging: a final comparison

I recorded my heart rate using the body blogging system and my daily mood using Moodscope for three months in 2011. I wrote about the aim of this project and some intermediary experiences in previous blogs and would now like to talk about my final impressions and what I learned from combining the two systems. I presented these results at the Quantified Self Conference in Amsterdam in November 2011.
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Reflections on Quantified Self Europe 2011

Last month I attended the inaugural Quantified Self Europe conference over in Amsterdam. I was there to present a follow-up talk to one I gave back in 2010 at Quantified Self London in which I described my experiences in tracking my heart rate along with publishing it in real-time over the Internet.

The Body Blogger system as it became known, after a term Steve came up with back in 2009, was only really intended to be used to demonstrate what could be done with the BM-CS5 heart monitors we’d recently purchased. As these devices allowed wireless real-time streaming of multiple heart rate monitors to a single PC there was a number of  interaction projects we wanted to try out and using web services to manage the incoming data and provide a platform for app development seemed the best choice to realise our ideas (see here and here for other stuff we’ve used The Body Blogger engine for).

Having tracked and shared my heart rate for over a year now I’ve pretty much exhausted what I can do with the current implementation of the system which I didn’t spend a whole lot of time developing in the first place (about a day on the core) and so my Amsterdam talk was pretty much a swan song to my experiences. During the summer, I stopped  tracking my heart rate (then fell sick for the first time since wearing the device, go figure I’d of liked to of captured that) so I could work on the next version of the system and loaned out the current one  to Ute who was interested in combining physiological monitoring with a mood tracking service. Ute was also in attendance at Amsterdam to present on her experiences with body blogging and mood tracking (for more information on this see the proposal and first impressions posts).

As with my previous reflections post, I’ve posted rather late so if your interested in what happened at the conference check out the following write-ups: – Guardian, Tom Hume,  and Alexandra Carmichael. The videos of the day I imagine will be online in the coming month or so, so if your interested in the particulars of my talk you’ll need to wait just a little bit longer, though I do cover a few of the topics I talked about during my CHI 2011 (video) talk (on the issues associated with inference and sharing physiological data).
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Lifestreams, body blogging and sousveillance

 

Way back in June, I planned to write a post prompted by Kevin Kelly’s talk at the Quantified Self conference in May and a new word I’d heard in an interview with David Brin.  Between then and now, the summer months have whipped by, so please excuse the backtracking – those of you who have seen the site before will have heard of our bodyblogger project, where physiological data is collected on a continuous basis and shared with others via social media sites or directly on the internet.  For instance, most of the time, the colour scheme for this website responds to heart rate changes of one of our bodybloggers (green = normal, yellow = higher than normal, red = much higher than normal – see this for full details).  This colour scheme can be mapped over several days, weeks and months to create a colour chart representation of heart rate data – the one at the top of this post shows a month’s worth of data (white spaces = missing data).

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Moodscope, subjective ratings and body blogging: my first impressions

At the beginning of the year I proposed to track my mood via Moodscope (subjective measure) while body blogging (physiological measure), what follows is my initial impressions so far in using these technologies before presenting my conclusions at the Quantified Self Conference in Amsterdam in November.

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How should real-time analysis be defined in physiological computing?

Admin: Please welcome to the site our new Physiological Computing blogger.

Greetings my name is Alexander Karran and I am a PhD student at the Liverpool John Moore’s School of Natural Science and Psychology, under the supervision of Dr Stephen Fairclough.  I will be working towards a research goal of developing a framework for real-time classifications of certain vectors of affect, using ambulatory body sensor networks under the umbrella of psychophysiology. This work will be multidisciplinary in nature, borrowing from and contributing to, computer science, e-health, psychology and affective computing.
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How should real-time analysis be defined in physiological computing?

Admin: Please welcome to the site our new Physiological Computing blogger.

Greetings my name is Alexander Karran and I am a PhD student at the Liverpool John Moore’s School of Natural Science and Psychology, under the supervision of Dr Stephen Fairclough.  I will be working towards a research goal of developing a framework for real-time classifications of certain vectors of affect, using ambulatory body sensor networks under the umbrella of psychophysiology. This work will be multidisciplinary in nature, borrowing from and contributing to, computer science, e-health, psychology and affective computing.
Continue reading →