Click here to view the embedded video.

This video depicts the collaborative wearable technology project of Bio Circuit in action. Bio Circuit was created at Emily Carr University by myself (Industrial Design student Dana Ramler), and MAA student Holly Schmidt.

Bio Circuit is a vest that provides a form of bio feedback using data from the wearer’s heart rate to determine what “sounds” they hear through the speaker embedded in the collar of the garment. The wearer places the heart rate monitor around the ribcage, resting against the skin and close to the heart. An MP3 audio player embedded in the vest plays the audio track related to that specific heart rate. The audio tracks are soundscapes mixed from a range of ambient sounds. If the wearer’s heart rate is low, the soundscape will reflect a quiet natural area with sounds such as water, birds and insects. If the wearer has a high heart rate then they will hear a cacophony of urban sounds such as people talking and traffic.

Bio Circuit stems from our concern for ethical design and the creation of media-based interactions that reveal human interdependence with the environment. With each beat of the heart, Bio Circuit connects the wearer with the inner workings of their body. In this sense the garment functions like other biofeedback devices that use sensors to provide a person with information about their physiological state. With Bio Circuit, we are proposing that these kinds of devices could extend a person’s awareness to include the environment.

* A special thank you to Suzi Webster, Bobbi Kozinuk, Emily Carr IDS, Bryan Rite and Angela Henderson.

Bio Circuit at IF'09: Stereo

Bio Circuit will be a part of the Stereo Exhibit in the Concourse gallery of Emily Carr University this week.

Stereo Interactive Futures ‘09: Stereo (IF’09: Stereo) will be hosted by the Intersections Digital Studios at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. IF’09: Stereo offers a broad thematic reading of “stereo” to include research and art works that use techniques and devices to lure the body into ephemeral spaces. Examples include stereographic films and animations, linked interactive performance spaces, simulated touch interfaces, binaural sound works, and mixed-reality art works. IF’09: Stereo has invited practitioners who are working with subtle uses of immersive techniques, illusionary space and objects, and telepresence that evoke unexpected responses and challenge the modes of creation used by popular entertainment media and technologies…>

IF’09: Stereo has invited media artists, designers, researchers and filmmakers experimenting with: stereographic projection; illusionary sound and vision; methods of co-location (ways of simultaneously mapping and representing more than one location).

If you’re interested in seeing Bio Circuit for yourself, you can visit Emily Carr University (1399 Johnston Street) on Granville Island in Vancouver. Stereo will be in the Concourse Gallery from Nov. 18-22nd. IF’09 is on from Nov. 19-21.

It’s finally finished! And it finally has a name! For months our wearable technology project has gone unnamed, but today we are pleased to introduce you to Bio Circuit*

Holly and I got together on Friday to do some filming, and hopefully we’ll be able to post some footage of Bio Circuit in action very soon! We are working on a submission to TEI’10, a conference for Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction. Our video and paper submission will be to the Explorations category, so keep your fingers crossed for us as well.

** thank you to the beautiful and wonderful Angela Henderson for being our model

That’s right, you guessed it: success. The changeover to the lilypad arduino went smoothly, and when we hooked it up to the battery power source everything worked!So now the technology pieces must be integrated into the garment. This will involve some temporary tacking and pockets, because we’re not sure exactly how it will work/feel once it is part of the vest. So before permanently altering the garment I’ve worked so hard on, we’ll try some arrangements and continue to develop that aspect later. But for now, we are both very happy with what we have.

Although it’s not done yet, I’ve posted some photos of the vest (a work in progress).So everyone will just have to wait and see how the whole thing looks together tomorrow morning.

Good luck everyone!

Thanks to the code Bryan helped us write, and some soldering skills from Holly and I, we have built upon what we have got so far, and today we were able to get the HRMI to communicate with the arduino! In short, we successfully asked the HRMI for a heart rate, the arduino calculated what “track” we should then be at, and moved the MP3 player to the correct track number! I was wearing the heart rate monitor, and it was playing different tracks as my heart rate changed. We were so excited and happy that it worked that my heart rate was increasing and the tracks were changing accordingly! It was brilliant, believe me.

The image I’ve posted is a screen shot that shows ‘proof’ that we got it to work. We are just a bit scared that once we try to transfer everything from the breadboard to the lilypad that something might screw up. So I’ve ‘documented’ the achievement as best I could.

In order to get the HRMI to talk to the arduino, we had to change some of the settings on the HRMI that came as factory default (this was the key). We needed to install the OPO jumper so that the HRMI could operate on I2C signals. This meant that we also had to uninstall the SJ1 jumper.

The next step is to move everything from the breadboard to the lilypad, which is, as I mentioned, the scariest part.

Cross your fingers for me**