#mood hat

After setting up the twitter account (@EmotiCap), me being me, I just had to create a little logo and corresponding twitter profile page graphics to make it a little more aesthetic... here's the full page:

As you can see we have progressed! Lizzie spent many an hour figuring out Processing --> Twitter, for our needs. Now when the LCD screen prints out the wearer's mood, it's automatically tweeted to this account!

While Chris and myself figured out the LEDs breadboard wiring (fiddly!), Anish and Ben were with Hannah trying to get the Nexus 10 to cooperate. Hannah has some prerecorded data in a nice little .txt file for us, but we were hoping to demonstrate live EmotiCap in the project presentations... at the moment this is looking unlikely! We'll see how the next few days go.

I've been doing some research into WHY we're using galvanic skin response (GSR) as a way to test emotion... according to most medical sites it's the most commonly used emotion sensor, but some moods make our skin react very similarly. It's not a definitive test, as it mainly detects tension, which means happiness, anger, stress, fear and sexual arousal all produce similar numerical data from the GSR. However, as we're basing this project on gimmicks such as mood rings and the Fortune Telling Fish, the accuracy of mood detection is less important.

All tissues in the human body, including skin, have the ability to conduct electricity. Indeed, this is how nerves function to relay information from one part of the body to another. The skin also has electrical activity, which is in constant, slight variation, and can be measured and charted. The skin's electrical conductivity fluctuates based on certain bodily conditions, and this fluctuation is called the galvanic skin response.

Sudden changes in emotion, such as fright, can trigger this response, as can other types of changes, such as the hot flashes that are characteristic of menopause. The galvanic skin response can be graphed on a chart for observation, in the same way that heart or brain activity is recorded. Even though this is the case, it is impossible to detect the type of emotion or physical change that elicited the reaction by simply looking at the graph.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-galvanic-skin-response.htm