Slow breathing through entrainment

Magic Tea is an interactive installation aimed to invite transformative experiences during the everyday act of preparing and drinking tea (fig. 1). The first design included several instances of entrainment to promote slow breathing. From previous user tests, it became clear that many participants didn’t notice the entraining stimuli or that the stimuli themselves were […]

breathing_time at the Quantified Self conference

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 […]

device and software

I’m currently developing the device design and the software for breathing_time. I realise now that the form factor of the device must come from the possibilities of the wind sensor. It works best when the breath is guided to the sensor. That way I can detect inhaling and exhaling. I’ve been trying out different sizes […]

breathing sequence slow

I’ve managed to program the first representation of breathing-time. This is a sequence of the way the drop changes when I’m actually breathing while wearing the stretch sensor. The dept of the breath determines the diameter and alpha value of the ‘drop’. The breath rate determines the blurring and horizontal position of the drop. Slow […]

discovering breath

I’ve upgraded my code for the stretch sensor graph in Processing. The sensor outputs numbers. When I breath in or out the number gets lower. Detecting breathing activity isn’t as easy as looking for a numbers below 200 for example. Because over the time of wearing the sensor the whole range of numbers starts to […]

stretch sensor visualisation

I’ve upgraded the first circuit with the potentiometers and the results look promising. I used the Processing sketch that comes with the Arduino to make a graphic of my breathing activity. I’ve tagged the different regions in the graph so it’s easy to follow the movement of the breath. Btw the circuit is constructed in […]