Meeting @ Anja’s house, 21-11-2008 from 12.00-17.00. Present: Anja, Barbara, Danielle.
Most of our time we spend on clarifying our concept and writing it down. This is the final result:
Goals
– Visualize inner states
– Create awareness
– Promote interaction
– Promote well-being
– New way of communicating/making contact
Introduction
These days people feel vulnerable when showing so called negative emotions, such as grief, sadness, pain, fear or anger. We want to create a space for these emotions and to communicate them in a other way. Our e-pressed shirt is a new communication layer for handling the vulnerability caused by these negative emotions.
By sensing and visualizing inner states, e-pressed creates awareness in the wearer and in others. Awareness is followed by possible interaction, which is stimulated by light visuals. Areas originating from acupressure therapy will light up and invite the wearer and others to press on them, relieving tension and stimulating well-being.
E-pressed stimulates a new way of communicating and making contact with others.
The shirt
Through the input of sensor(s): we would like to define 3 different inner states
At a discrete position the status Light shows the currant inner state to the wearer.
1. Inner state: balanced – action: no interaction is necessary
Visual effect: Status light is white.
0 acupressure areas light up
2. Inner state: low energy – action: stimulation
Visual effect: Status light is orange light.
2 acupressure areas light up
3. Inner state: high energy (stress) – action: calming
Visual effect: blue LED on in control switch
4 acupressure areas light up
What happens
The different points light up according to the input given by the sensor(s). The points will be situated in “areas of interaction”. These areas should facilitate the process of finding the correct pressure points on different people. They will be identified by an outline of LED’s or a print.
By pressing the points, other people can interact with the wearer and get vibration feedback while pressing them.
When the ‘treatment time’ is over, both light and vibration will stop.
The latest version of our heart-rate sensor proved to be not quite finished. It was odd to see that it didn’t work very well on Danielle (probably because of her small fingers) but it was OK on Anja and Barbara. We do have to adjust the pod-meters with every person which makes it less generic… The biggest problem is that we can’t write the data to file like we could earlier. So it was hard to analyse and use. Danielle will work with Richard on that.
Danielle has send an e-mail to Bernard from Imec for a possible collaboration to work with their sensors.
Barbara will work on the pressure areas. See how things work out with print and LED or fiber LED.
Next meeting was planned for week 50 but that’s probably too short notice.