Since the beginning of the semester I’ve had a one track mind in regards to the Rest of You class. I’ve wanted to find a way to track my level of excitement, my emotions and moods so that I could gain insights about what makes me happy (or better yet, how I can lead a fulfilling life). This direction stems from my long-term interest to understand myself better and specifically to understand my relationship to the world around me. I strongly believe that I am responsible for my emotions; this is not to say that I can control the way my body responds to the world.

Emotions encompass more than just the physiological responses of my body, they also entail the conscious process the classify our physiological responses into emotion categories. I strongly believe that I have the power to be the conscious writer of the stories that my brain creates and that define my conscious experience of the world, and my emotional response to these experiences.

With all of this in mind, to succeed in my project I felt that it was important for me to find ways to capture three different types of data: 1) information about my physiological level of excitement; 2) contextual data about what I was up throughout this research (e.g. my activities and locations); and, 3) personal thoughts and reactions related to what’s going on in my life. From conversations with others during the last couple of days I am also considering adding a fourth data dimension to this project: capturing input from people who interact with me regarding my current mood.

So here is how I plan to capture all of this data:

1. Physiological data: I’ve built a small portable biometric sensing device (pictured above) that will capture my heart rate and galvanic skin response. This little device will travel with me 10 – 12 hours a day. Whenever my vital signs go above a pre-defined threshold the light on this device will flash to request for me to categorize my excitement is either a positive or negative experience.
2. Contextual data: I will use two separate processes to capture contextual data. First, the portable device that I have created will feature a GPS component that will enable tracking of my location and time of day. Second, every night I will update a calendar with detailed information about my activities for that day.
3. Personal perspectives: to capture my feelings, emotions and moods I will use two main processes. First, the buttons on the portable biometric device will capture high-level positive/negative data regarding my emotions. The more informative means of capturing data will be via twitter feeds. Every time that I make a positive/negative input on the biometric device I will also send a tweet with a brief note regarding my current mood.
4. Perspectives from others: to capture data from others regarding my emotional states and mood I will request that people send tweets to a specific hash tag with their input (or I may set-up a text message inbox – any suggestions of a good service where I can set this up, please let me know).

One last potential data set that is ripe for analysis is my emails and blog posts. I have not yet decided whether or not I will add this lens to the project. The good thing about this data is that I don’t have to proactively capture it, I can decide to analyze it on the back end.

As I capture data over the next month I will work to develop visualizations that will help me gain insights from all of this information. There are a couple of perspectives I know I want to explore: 1) my mood based activity type (particular classes at ITP, time spent with specific people, time spent doing yoga, time eating or drinking – better yet drunk); 2) my mood based on time of day or week (when am I most happy); 3) my mood graphed geographically (what places excite me?); 4) my perspective versus the perspective of those around me.

Here are some relevant links to pictures and videos related to this project:

1) geo-based visualization prototype of my GSR readings during a 2-hour bike ride
2) treemap visualization based on key-logging done over an entire week
3) pictures of the prototypes of my portable bio-metric device

I have long been interested in the idea of doing a mood mapping projects for personal understanding and growth, quality of life improvements and a search for fulfillment. These are lofty goals and big expectations, I know. I am aware that my project probably won’t amount to much in these areas but in the least I expect to be able to glean some simple insights regarding what makes me happy.

Since the beginning of this semester my focus at ITP has shifted towards the exploration of personal wellness. For a long time I have been interested in helping myself and others create possibilities and fulfillment in their lives. Since last year many seeds have been planted that are now enabling me to make this shift. Here is a brief overview of the various “fertilizers” that have helped create this budding possibility:

• Over the last year I have had a personal focus on my physical and mental health. Health was actually my theme for the year. As part of this initiative I am practicing yoga and meditation. I have also overcome an addiction that was acting as impediment to my personal growth.
• During this time I have also developed a new relationship with food. This was largely driven by the need to start cooking to save money, but has now blossomed into my involvement in local food communities such as my neighborhood CSA.
• During the past year I’ve also had the opportunity to listen to and participate in many inspiring conversations. Two, amongst the many, people who have contributed to my life in this area are my mom (aka my yogi) and Linda Stone (who has some very interesting notions about post-productivity computing – check it out here).

One thing that has become clear to me over the past several years is that life cannot be reduced to language. I know this sounds like an obvious claim. However, living in our mind-obsessed society I have noticed that I have become accustomed to focusing (better yet, limiting) my experience of the world around to what can be grasped by my mind and described in language. I know that my mind does not have the bandwidth to enable me to experience the true richness of the world all by itself. The models of the world that reside in my mind and the language which acts as a filter on my experience arbitrarily cuts up the real world into small dead symbols that lack the beauty of the reality to which they point.

Ok, now I am getting preachy and rather esoteric. To bring it back down to earth, I just want to say that it is only through our body and its intelligence that we can more fully experience life. So now bringing it back to my current pursuits, I want to work on developing technologies that are designed for human beings, not human minds.

I’ll keep today’s journal entry focused on the big picture. I’ll share more about the specifics of how I plan to achieve this in the next couple of days. In the meantime, you can download the code for this patch from github. I’ve already created a few prototypes so progress is happening at a steady clip.

Ok, so I like to give credit where credit is due. With that in mind I want to give a shout out to the Bluetooth Mate from Sparkfun and to Amarino. If it were not for these two dear friends I would probably be pulling my hair out right now, while stressing out because of all the other projects that would be feeling neglected and begging for my attention.

Over the coming week I still need to edit both my Arduino and Android sketches to make sure that these devices are able to send and receive the appropriate data. I also plan on using the Android phone to do some GPS logging. Now let me tell you a bit more about the Bluetooth Mate and Amarino:

The Bluetooth Mate, which I received last week, had been unfairly judged as a snobby high-priced component that was actually making me feel stupid for having spent so much money when I could have gone with the $20 option. However, what I soon found out was that this component makes up for its high price by being willing to play nice with other devices such as computers and cell phones. This meant that I was able to avoid hours and hours of stress that often associated to configuring bluetooth transmitters.

Now let me shower some praise on the Amarino. Amarino is comprised of two libraries, one for the Arduino and the other for the Android. Together these two resources make it much easier for you to establish communications between the Arduino and Android. That is not to say that this process is easy – some understanding of how to code for Android is still required to customize the code samples available on the Amarino site. You also have to know a little bit about how to use the terminal so that you can install the Amarino application on your Android phone. Below I’ve included some important tricks that I learned.

In order to install Amarino on your Android phone you need to add the path to thr tools folder from the Android SDK to your PATH. Supposedly this can be done by creating a file called .bash_profile that includes this path, and then saving this file to your home directory. However, I had to take a different approach for this to work on my computer – I had to edit the file called paths directly from using the Terminal application. This is how this is done:

1. Launch the Terminal application
2. Open the paths file using the following command: “sudo pico /etc/paths”
3. Add the path to this file (do not change any of the other paths)
4. Press Ctrl-X to exit the text editor
5. Confirm that you want to save the file by pressing “y”
6. Press return one last time to exit the editor (I know it’s repetitive)
7. Exit the Terminal program
8. Open the Terminal application
9. Type the following command: “echo $PATH”
10. Confirm that the appropriate path has been added