Author Archives: danielle roberts

Quantified Self Conference Europe 2013

Posted on by
Reply

For me the quantified self conferences are like coming home: getting inspired by hundreds of people who share the same passion. It is hard to make a choice but in this post I would like to list my top three experiences of this QS conference edition.

1. Lonely at the top is the TrueSense wearable bio-sensor kit. It is “the first affordable, ultra-compact, ultra-low-power, bio-signal acquisition kit that allows bio-signal capturing anywhere, any time and on multiple body locations.” And oh yeah, it costs 35 Euro and is OpenSource(!)

I’ve had a nice half hour demo from Fu-Chieh Hsu the inventor and manufacturer of this sensor set. It can track: brainwaves, heart-rate (and deduce breath-rate from that), muscle tension, movement, posture and electro smog. Both real-time (using wifi) or as a logger (it can store at least 11 hours). The nice thing is that you get the full spectrum of waves. It is raw data, not ‘cleaned’. So you yourself can separate muscle movement from brainwaves for example. Another great thing is that you can use several of them on different places on your body. And there is the ability to set markers using the two buttons on the controller.

I haven’t had time to experiment yet. But watch this space for applications and experiments in the near future.

2. My second choice is my own breakout session “Tracking Breathing as a Unifying Experience” which I’ve described here. The reason for it being in my top three is that is was such a valuable experience to get feedback on my new wearables. The participants were enthusiastic and genuinely interested in the topic. It has really given my project a boost.

3. Last but not least are the nice and interesting conversations I’ve had with so many people. Every break I’ve met new people and learned about they’re ideas and projects. No matter at what table I sat down, it was always inspiring. That’s what makes this conference so great. I’m looking forward to the things that will emerge from all those conversations.

There was of course a lot more to see and hear about. Here are some of the runners up (in no particular order): Poikos to make a 3D image of your body with your smartphone (without taking your clothes off), LifeSlice for capturing webcam images of your face and screenshots. Things I’ve been thinking about and working on too. Unfortunately only for the Mac. Empatica for real-time stress measurement in teams. This is closely related to our e-Pressed project. There was Memoto, a life logging device which was discussed in a broad discussion. I’ve had plenty of experience with life logging in my project North-South feeling back in 2008/9. I also included heart-rate and pictures taken in the bathroom and toilet. Using Memoto will definitely reduce time spend on data cleaning and parsing. The last project I want to mention is One year in paper by Merel Brouns. It immediately reminded me of my recently finished piece Reversed Calendar.

Merel logged one year of her life in an analogue way using coloured tape and paper. I liked her addition of the daylight hours, using grey for night time.

And of course lots more…

breathing_time at the Quantified Self conference

Posted on by
Reply

On May 12th I lead a breakout session at the second European quantified self conference in Amsterdam. The goal was to exchange experiences in breath and group tracking and to demo the new, wireless version of the breathing_time concept.

I started the breakout with an overview of the previous version. We soon got into a discussion on how hard it was to control your breathing rate. One participant used an Emwave device to try and slow down his breath rate. He could never quite make the target and therefore could never reach heart coherence which is frustrating. In my view the way to go is to become more and more aware of your breathing without intentionally wanting to change it. I went from chronic hyperventilation to an average breath rate of 4 times per minute without trying. Doing daily Zen meditation for lots of years has done it for me.

As usual people saw some interesting applications for the device I hadn’t thought of like working with patient groups. Another nice suggestion was to try out the placebo effect of just wearing the cone.

When it was time for the demo people could pick up one of the breathCatchers:

I’d managed to finish four wireless wearables. Working on 12 volt batteries with an Xbee module and an Arduino Fio for transmitting the data.

After some exploration we did two short breathing sessions so we could compare. The first was to just sit in a relaxed way and not really pay attention to the breathing (purple line). The second was to really focus on the breathing (grey line). The graph below shows the results:

Participants could look at the visual feedback but I noticed most closed their eyes to be able to concentrate better.

The last experiment was the unified visualisation of four participants. I asked them to pay close attention to the visualisation which represented the data as four concentric circles. A moving dot indicates breathing speed and moves depending on the breath flow.

It was fascinating to watch as the dots were moving simultaneously a lot of the time. However when asked how this session was experienced most participants saw the exercise as a game and were trying to overtake each other. They used “breath as a joystick”, to quote one of them. This was not my intention, the focus should be on the unifying aspect. I got some nice suggestions on how to achieve this: give more specific instructions and adapt the visuals to split the personal and communal data.

breathCatcher

All in all we had a very good time exploring respiration and I’m grateful to all of the participants for their enthusiasm and valuable feedback.

printing and constructing

Posted on by
Reply

The worlds thickest block calendar is finished. Last week was spend on printing the 2865 pages, perforating them and constructing the calendar. The printing turned out to be more of a challenge then expected.

The inner peace visualisation consists of several layers of circles with varying transparency. Printing those pages resulted in extra thick lines in other parts of the print. To solve this the layers had to be flattened and saved in a PDF 1.3 document. As it took me quite some time to figure out how this is done, this is how I solved it. I opened the document in Acrobat and saved it as a PostScript file. I then opened it in Acrobat Distiller and saved it as PDF/X-3:2002. The whole process took a couple of hours because hundreds of pages had to be flattened. It took the printer around 8 hours to print the whole document! Thanks again to Tiggelman, they’ve done a great job.

After the printing was done I went to the print workshop at St Joost art academy, thanks to John too. Here I perforated 1400 pages by hand with the nice stamp perforation. After I got the hang of it and managed to perforate 4 or 5 leaves at a time it only took me around 6 hours in total.

Then the pages and tab sheets had to be cut and drilled (also done by Tiggelman). I then had two big stacks of pages which had to put into the right order. I then added the tabs and noted the years on them.

The final challenge was to actually build the calendar by pushing the pipes through the drill holes and slowly building one big stack. I had to use small stacks of around 50 pages. The whole was secured by using a long piece of threaded end inside the pipe and rings with wing nuts. Inside the pipe was also strong rope to hang the calendar from the ceiling.

Looking forward to the exhibition: FINAL SHOW 20 april – 23 june at Lokaal 01, Kloosterlaan 138, Breda. Together with 200 other artists.

calendar perforation

Posted on by
Reply

Being able to tear of pages is an important part of the calendar. So I’ve been investigating the possibilities. At first I hoped the printer, Tiggelman, would just do it for me. Alas their perforation turned out to be too vulnerable. The nice people at St Joost art academy and office supplies Benoist gave me the opportunity to test two different systems for perforation: one with a blade and the other with punch holes:

The top page has a stamp perforation. The stack is one year. This gives me insight into the size and weight of the calendar. The total weight will be around 5 kilogram. The thickness will be around 32 cm.

I still haven’t decided which perforation to use. I will have to do it by hand whichever one I choose. But the ease in which the papers can be torn off will be decisive.

flickr problems

Posted on by
Reply

Downloading the big format photo’s from Flickr turned out to be more trouble then I expected. Downloading the small format pictures went like a breeze, as I explained here. But on almost all the big files I got this picture:

I suppose I got kicked out. I only realised this when I wanted to integrate the pictures in the pdf so that was a bit of a set back. I had to think of a way to download the photo’s and be able to link them to the dataset. I’ve used two programs to download all my pictures from Flickr: Bulkr and PhotoSuck. Both contained the Flickr photo id in their file names. I found and rewrote a script to list all the file names, loop through them and save the pictures under their id used in the dataset. I keep being pleasantly surprised by Java and Processing. Eventually I only had to download only on picture by hand:

The next step is scaling the differently sized pictures to match the width of the pdf. I think I might also use the titles and tags of the pictures in a subtle way, I’m not quite sure yet.

test prints

Posted on by
Reply

Today I went to make test prints and the results look very promising.

The people at Tiggelman repro were very helpful. They suggested I use a paper called Reviva which has a nice newspaper look. The lines I use in my design are only 0.4 pixels thick and the lighter ones were barely visible when I printed them on my printer. But at Tiggelman they’ve got a very good printer which can print those lines and gives very sharp prints in general. This is necessary as lots of lines are very subtle. They will print a test stack of 500 pages and do all the manipulations like drilling and perforating. I’m really looking forward to holding that first stack in my hands.

days of my life

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been programming hard to shape the pages that will represent my life in the calendar. I’ve used Marcos’ statistics to make a nice backdrop for my pages using the average of stress, energy, mood and inner peace values. Layered on top of that are the distinguishing values for the above parameters. I’ve also already incorporated the diary, haiku’s and photographs. It might take some tweaking still but the basics are there. See for yourself:

And a day with less data:

So the horizontal lines is the energy, diagonal is stress, the V or upside down is the mood and the white circles represent inner peace. All vary in colour and repetition depending on the value. I do love the different patterns that are drawn. Quite surprising.

working with data

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been experimenting with the design and data visualisation using the personal data values: mood, stress, energy level and inner peace. Depending on the data value the lines, shapes and tone of each visualisation varies. This will create a different structure for every timeslot in every day.

Inner peace will be a big organic and mysterious shape.

Energy and stress level will be pictured using horizontal an vertical lines respectively. The upper image is average energy and stress level. The lower is low energy and high stress.

Mood will be an arrow head/smiley pointing upwards or downwards. It is the most upper layer, clearly visible on the peace shape.

This is an experiment with combined output for 4 timeslots using real data. It gets a bit busy and the lines in different directions are making me feel a little giddy. So work to be done but it’s a promising start.

working with images

Posted on by
Reply

The calendar contains 863 photographs taken over the last eight years. Some days have multiple pictures most days have no pictures. Using a double loop I loop through the days again and for every day I loop the entire array to get the days where I took more pictures.

Once I knew I could detect all the images for every day I had to reconstruct the file name from the csv file containing the photo meta data which I created with the phpFlickrSync application which I described earlier. I wanted the pictures on my hard drive so it will be more stable once I start creating the pdf files. For that purpose I discovered this great Processing function called saveStream(). It takes just a file name and an url parameter. In my big loop I downloaded the files in medium size and renamed them to the index in the array with photo data. In fifteen minutes I’d downloaded and renamed all the 863 pictures. This is part of the result:

virtual to paper

Posted on by
Reply

I managed to convert the micro-diary to PDF output. It’s quite moving to see my virtual diary which has spend almost eight years in a database printed on paper. There’s is no layout yet, that will follow later. I have to make sure the it is technically feasible and then I can start tweaking the appearance.

Update @ 11/3/13 I’ve now got a 2867 page pdf file of A5 format: