Tomorrow is the first of ten meetings for the wearable group at the Digital Lab in Den Bosch, The Netherlands. Together with nine other artists we’ll each be designing and developing our own wearable. We’ll receive artistic support from Anna Maria Cornelia De Gersem and technical support from the lab.
I’ve been looking forward to this work group for a long time. It was scheduled for last year but was cancelled then. For the rest of the year we’ll be meeting regularly to work together and exchange ideas. In between the meetings we can continue with our piece our self.
For this work group I’ll finally be realising an idea I’ve had for quite some time. I want to monitor the air quality with different sensors and display the data real time on a wearable. This way me and other people can assess how healthy the air is we’re breathing. The piece will therefore be called Body-warner. The design will be inspired on a safety vest. There the bight colours are mend to warn others that you’re there. My vest will warn myself and others of possible dangers around us.
I don’t want the data to be lost so the plan is collect the data with a mobile phone and send it to an online database. I’ll be using a (Lillypad) Arduino with Bluetooth to communicate with the mobile phone. Through the phone’s internet connection I’ll send the sensor data to a server every couple of minutes. I want to develop a frontend using Google Maps to display the results. Through a calendar functionality you should be able to retrieve older air quality information for the areas I’ve visited wearing the vest.
There are lots of challenges and learning points for me here. As for the design/interface: apart from the reference to a safety vest I’m not at all sure how I will display the data. The vest could have a ‘cloud’ of LEDs (view sketch) or I may be using the chemical names for the gasses I’m measuring. They all contain an O which is nice 🙂 On the other hand I could work with rows of LEDs or even a display…
I also haven’t decided on which gasses to measure yet. It’ll depend on the availability of the sensors and if they can be combined with an Arduino. For example I’d like to measure oxygen, O2 (nice) but I don’t know if that actually tells me something about air quality. It would do inside, but I’m still don’t know if I’ll measure inside or if I’ll make a special indoor mode. This will also depend on the GPS I’ll be using. Will I get a separate Bluetooth one or integrate one with the Arduino?
I’m looking forward to finding out more about Bluetooth and Arduino and especially about the communication between the Arduino and the mobile phone. Gaining this knowledge will open up many new possibilities for me.
I’ve already had a lot of fun doing research for this project. The list of links on the right shows that lots of people are interested in the subject and working on similar projects which is very inspiring.