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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BCI, biocybernetic control and gaming

Way back in 2008, I was due to go to Florence to present at a workshop on affective BCI as part of CHI. In the event, I was ill that morning and missed the trip and the workshop. As I’d prepared the presentation, I made a podcast for sharing with the workshop attendees. I dug it out of the vaults for this post because gaming and physiological computing is such an interesting topic.

The work is dated now, but basically I’m drawing a distinction between my understanding of BCI and biocybernetic adaptation. The former is an alternative means of input control within the HCI, the latter can be used to adapt the nature of the HCI. I also argue that BCI is ideally suited certain types of game mechanics because it will not work 100% of the time. I used the TV series “Heroes” to illustrate these kinds of mechanics, which I regret in hindsight, because I totally lost all enthusiasm for that show after series 1.

The original CHI paper for this presentation is available here.

 

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: – GuardianTom 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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Mood and Music: effects of music on driver anger

Last month I gave a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society held at Leeds University in the UK.  I stood on the podium and presented the work, but really the people who deserve most of the credit are Marjolein van der Zwaag (from Philips Research Laboratories) and my own PhD student at LJMU Elena Spiridon.

You can watch a podcast of the talk above.  This work was originally conducted as part of the REFLECT project at the end of 2010.  This work was inspired by earlier research on affective computing where the system makes an adaptation to alleviate a negative mood state.  The rationale here is that any such adaptation will have beneficial effects – in terms of reducing duration/intensity of negative mood, and in doing so, will mitigate any undesirable effects on behaviour or the health of the person.

Our study was concerned with the level of anger a person might experience on the road.  We know that anger causes ‘load’ on the cardiovascular system as well as undesirable behaviours associated with aggressive driver.  In our study, we subjected participants to a simulated driving task that was designed to make them angry – this is a protocol that we have developed at LJMU.  Marjolein was interested in the effects of different types of music on the cardiovascular system while the person is experiencing a negative mood state; for our study, she created four categories of music that varied in terms of high/low activation and positive/negative valence.

The study does not represent an investigation into a physiological computing system per se, but is rather a validation study to explore whether an adaptation, such as selecting a certain type of music when a person is angry, can have beneficial effects.  We’re working on a journal paper version at the moment.

REFLECT Project Promo Video

Some months ago, I wrote this post about the REFLECT project that we participated in for the last three years.  In short, the REFLECT project was concerned with research and development of three different kinds of biocybernetic loops: (1) detection of emotion, (2) diagnosis of mental workload, and (3) assessment of physical comfort.  Psychophysiological measures were used to assess (1) and (2) whilst physical movement (fidgeting) in a seated position was used for the latter.  And this was integrated into the ‘cockpit’ of a  Ferrari.

The idea behind the emotional loop was to have the music change in response to emotion (to alleviate negative mood states).  The cognitive loop would block incoming calls if the driver was in a state of high mental workload and air-filled bladders in the seat would adjust to promote physical comfort.  You can read all about the project here.  Above you’ll find a promotional video that I’ve only just discovered – the reason for my delayed response in posting this is probably vanity, the filming was over before I got to the Ferrari site in Maranello.  The upside of my absence is that you can watch the much more articulate and handsome Dick de Waard explain about the cognitive loop in the film, which was our main involvement in the project.

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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ARtSENSE Visual Aesthetic Interest Survey

03/01/12

The survey is now CLOSED. Thank you to all our participants.

We invite you to take part in the ARtSENSE Visual Aesthetic Interest Survey. The survey asks you to give subjective ratings, i.e. your thoughts and feelings, towards artworks on a number of scales. The survey is part of the ARtSENSE project which investigates augmented reality supported adaptive and personalized experience in a museum based on processing real-time sensor events.

ARtSENSE tackles a very important problem in the modern usage of ICT in cultural heritage domain. It aims to bridge the gap between the digital world with the physical in a highly flexible way in order to enable a novel and adaptive cultural experience.

You can complete the study online and it shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes. You will be given feedback about the picture you have rated as most interesting and how it compares to that others have rated most interesting. You can also enter a prize draw for some Amazon vouchers!

To take part in this study (you have to be at least 18) and for further details go to:

http://physiologicalcomputing.net/isurvey/

Many Thanks,

Ute Kreplin

PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University, UK

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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