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!

The next step was to create a logic-flow chart, which would form the foundation for writing our program. I had some help here, along with the programming, from the lovely Bryan (thank you Bryan!). Once the logic was written, the rest was easy for Bryan, and started to make some sense for me.

The ’sketch’ for now works as follows:

- we can now give the sketch a random heart rate, and it will calculate which track the MP3 player should play, and successfully move to that track. Believe me, it sounds much easier than it actually is! The last step now is to successfully get the heart rate monitor interface (HRMI) to talk to the arduino, which is what we are having problems with now.

I’m quite well versed in sewing, so this project has been fairly straightforward in terms of creating the wearable portion. The trickiest part is always creating the pattern. Holly and I want to create a high-collared garment, so that the speaker can be embedded within the collar next to the wearer’s ear. The collar is going to be higher on the speaker side, and then scrunch down on the other side, so the wearer can hear the environmental sounds as well. The photos I’ve posted show the beginnings of patterning, with a paper and mannequin mock-up, and then me wearing the very crude garment that I’ve thrown together, before the tailoring and adjustments I’ve made now.