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Monday, January 11, 2010

Project Cold Feet


GSR Bouquet
Originally uploaded by geekphysical
So this was written a day before the wedding, but now two days after the wedding, I am finally able to post it! Enjoy!

The couple (who met creating a critical corset that tightens when the wearer's heart rate goes up) have decided to take the leap and get married! We of course love biometrics and geekery and thus have decided that our wedding needs to be equally geeky. We've been working hard on taking our biometrics project into a new realm, detecting wedding emotions and datalogging the entire day.

We're able to see at a glance, if the bride gets cold feet, or is just very excited by her bouquet. The bouquet is implanted with fibre optics, lit by two bright LEDs, one blue, one white. The LEDs show changes in Galvanic Skin Response. As emotion swings from relaxed (blue) to alert (white) the fibre optics will gently glow and the bouquet will display the colors accordingly. The bouquet will be composed of all white flowers, lilies and orchids to make sure that the lights are visible.

At the same time, heart rate is recorded for both bride and groom on the datalogger.

The datalogger, from Sparkfun, a "LogoMagic 2" is recording analog signal directly on to a 1GB SD card. The analog signal it's getting is both the heart rate signal from an optical heart rate sensor (see our post here about this - http://geekphysicalbiometrics.blogspot.com/2009/09/designing-glove.html) and the data from Galvanic Skin Response - GSR - (read, emotional state) measured from two electrodes touching the skin. The heart rate optical measure, an LED and a photo transistor and the two electrodes for the GSR are housed in a velcro strap that sits, most appropriately, on the wearer's ring finger. It could of course be on any finger, but this is simply the most fun.

The bride holds the bouquet and has the 'ring' on her left hand ring finger. The datalogger is housed in the base of the bouquet with the wire wrapped around the bouquet base so she slides her finger into the ring and holds on to the bouquet all at the same time. The groom has his datalogger on his wrist, held in place by a wrist band, under his tuxedo arm.

Data can be recorded on the 1GB SD card for up to 15 days but we'll just be recording the one, from morning until the late hours of the night.

We've also placed proximity sensors (using infrared) on the two dataloggers so we can see how many times throughout the day we're side by side, or far apart.


Many more photos coming as soon as we pick up the bouquet, in the meantime, check these out!


Video! Blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/3082759 OR youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k89BoX2AxhM

"Undercover"
by Citizen Nyx





SCHEMATIC for GSR & HR: http://jump.fm/VXDTG

2 comments:

  1. Congratulation!

    I hope both the day and the data are wonderful.
    Any chance of releasing the designs for all the components?

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  2. Hi Derek, we're working on making some schematics for the galvanic skin response. The heart rate is just a photo transistor and LED like this (http://www.picotech.com/experiments/calculating_heart_rate/) but integrated into our circuit. - V

    ReplyDelete