It was a great honour to be invited to present the opening plenary at the Quantified Self Europe Conference in Amsterdam at which I was asked to speak to the attendees about sensors for wearable technology.
Quantified Self “self knowledge through numbers” is a meet up organisation for people who are interested in self-tracking and enjoy sharing their experiences, plus listening to the research and techniques of others too. Groups are held in a show and tell arrangement and attendees take turns in presenting their research, tools and methods. I attend the London meet-ups , they’re very insightful, friendly and great for bouncing ideas & info.
Here’s my slides…
During my presentation I introduced the audience to the LilyPad Arduino, the sewable microcontroller that I use with e-textiles & electronic components for most of my wearable tech, with some of my insights into what I feel makes this microcontroller fabulous, followed by some thoughts on what could be improved.
My talk then looked at the main components for wearables and a brief explanation of what they do, in particular sensors and actuators for which I created a graphic to show some of the most prominent user areas of these components and which components they’re mostly using (in my humble opinion). For me at least, this helps me consider where funding for wearables is going and also what’s being created, and by whom. I gave a few examples of existing projects that include sensors and that I feel are rather exciting and inspirational – looking at one example per usage area.
Finally in my summing up, I offered my thoughts on wearables and e-textiles as an emerging technology and perhaps what improvements could be made.
I enjoyed the QS conference and I was pleased at how many hardware prototype talks and breakout sessions there were. I attended a great breakout session on hardware prototyping where I had a good chinwag with fellow engineers and designers.
During the talks, I was introduced to a very nice example of a piece of wearable tech in development by Hind Hobeika called Butterfleye – which are swimming goggles that allow the wearer to monitor their heart rate and gives real time feedback to the wearer via a visual system.
There were also many talks from QS-ers on different aspects of self-monitoring and personal stories about what they’d experimented with and conclusions in terms of their own tracking. For example, I enjoyed Chia Hwu’s talk on why she’s banned from drinking caffeine – which turned out to be an engaging story on genetics and how some people metabolise caffeine slower than others, she had a similar story to tell about alcohol and genetics – both substances send me a bit loopy, so I was nodding from the back of the room and we had an affirming chat afterwards. There’s a nice write-up of it on QS which also mentions Martha Rotter’s interesting story of her investigation into food allergies in relation to skin complaints.
I had a lovely time at QS EU and it was great to meet people I had chatted to on Twitter such as organisers Gary Wolf and Alex Carmichael, as well as very interesting researchers such as Kiel Gilleade whose Body Blogger work monitoring his heart rate is right up my street, as I have my own hacks looking at heart rate and social interaction such as ‘You Make My Heart Flutter‘. Plus Kiel had an informative and entertaining tale to tell about the moments of stress he’s given himself and his friends who are able to watch his heart rate online at and jump to all sorts of conclusions! I’ve managed to freak myself out too by experimenting with wearing heart rate monitors outside the gym, so was smiling at Kiel’s tales.
If you’d like to view some of the personal self-tracking presentations from Quantified Self EU, including all the examples I mention above, Ernesto Ramirez (who also did a great job of being main stage tech manager at the conference) has posted 33 of them on slideshare for you to peruse
And if you fancy a bit of Quantified Self action yourself there are tons of QS groups springing up all over the world, check the QS site and if there isn’t one in your area you could always start one up!
As anyone who has read a couple of my posts will know, I really enjoy creating wearable electronics and art, plus it’s such an exciting time to be working in this area as everything is still to play for in terms of what the future killer apps for wearable technology will be. I’m finding though, that my scope for what I am building and wanting to build is not so much limited by knowledge, imagination and bloody-mindedness to get code and hardware to work together, but increasingly how I can power my portable works without weighing myself down with a plethora of large & lumpy battery packs!
Most of the components and rapid prototyping kit (eg microcontrollers) that I use are not power hungry at around 5< Volts apiece and it’s easy to buy small holders for AA, AAA and coin cell batteries that aren’t too obtrusive if you don’t mind having a pocket sewn into your clothing somewhere strategic and a bit of lumpiness, plus some wiring to hide. But if you want to run more than one component, you get into problems of how to power them simultaneously and it’s usually a no-no if you want to use one small battery pack – then it ends up with me getting my oscilloscope out to try to work out what’s going on.
For time based events, such as a fun night out at White Mischief, wearing electroluminescent accoutrements such as el-wire and panels is fine, but I have to carry a bag of batteries around with me for my 4 x AAA powered inverters that require changing every two hours. It’s not always easy to negotiate a huge tutu and corsetry in toilet cubicles for changing batteries – but I guess you could try to argue that’s my error for choosing such impractical garments, though for a performer a quick battery change is probably a bit more crucial. On the other end of the scale I make electronics for more minimalist garments such as t-shirts and necklaces, which can induce a conundrum to find somewhere to hide the batteries!
I’ve considered using Li-Po batteries, which are in common use in mobile phones and the laptop I’m typing on right now, and people do use them for wearables. Personally, I’m not convinced I’d want them close to my skin as they can get hot or in garments that stand a chance of getting wet or punctured as Li-Pos can be rather volatile (& I have considered making polymorph cases for them). They’re not fundamentally unsafe, they’re just a little more cumbersome to charge than my regular household rechargeable batteries as they require a bit of attention to monitor charging correctly. I have them for use with microcontrollers already and I have a fire retardant charging bag for them as most guides recommend this, plus that you don’t leave them unattended while they’re charging. I’d be a bit hesitant to sell someone a garment that had Li-Po batteries if they hadn’t used them before.
My wearable technology work isn’t confined to arty el-wire outfits, I’m very interested in sensing wearables and have a stack of sensors that I use singularly or combined for tracking and sensing purposes., plus I have loads of other interactive components and conductive materials for pieces of work that have various current draws that I’d like to have some longevity and reliability.
In the wider world there are multiple areas and uses for wearable technology to consider that urgently need better battery capabilities. Firstly, medical wearables would really benefit from extended battery life, for example, my dear uncle has a pacemaker, which has a battery that needs to be replaced every 5-ish years, so for him battery life means another invasive procedure, with the stress and risks of infection, etc, which he could happily do without. Other, non-invasive wearable medical devices might give a good deal of relief and freedom to users if the batteries didn’t require a swinging handbag full of battery to cart them about. Sounds a small price to pay for freedom, but it would probably make life a bit easier if they weren’t so heavy, increase uptake of usage – plus take some of the stress out of choosing whether to use / invest in wearable / portable medical aids.
There’s also dangerous / extreme environments uses of wearable tech, where users may be out in the field or location for weeks at a time in extreme conditions, so you don’t really want your batteries to fail you or be a house brick round your neck when you’re already packing a lot of kit. You really need them light, very long lasting and capable of smart power allocation to make the best of each charge. It seems the military have the serious funding for tech advancements for wearables and I see a lot of awards for work in this area. Though how long it will take for the fruits from this research to be revealed and trickle down into for civilian use is anyone’s guess, but any battery enhancing revelations would be so useful for medical wearables, as well as lifestyle usage.
With the 2012 Olympics less than a year away, we shouldn’t overlook sports wearables either – as broadcasters wish to bring the sportsperson’s experience into our homes as well as athletes wishing for ever more robust measures of their performance – it’s not going to help if they’re running with a brick on their backs!
Battery life for portable electronics is a daily bugbear for a lot of people, most commonly smart phone users – many having to carry their chargers around with them or include remembering to plug in and charge every night in their bedtime routines. Addicted as I am to checking my email & Twitter (yeah, I know) I’d love to have my phone connected to the interwibbles all the time (yes, connectivity is often crap too), so I can just get an alert if I’m waiting for an email, reply or DM – I can’t have my mobile connected to 3G / wifi all the time the though as it’ll run my battery down really quickly. This makes for a very ‘opaque’ technology – I have to keep stopping what I’m doing and switching it on and off again, rather than a transparent technology that allows me to get on with my with what I’m doing as it checks things for me in the background. A classic example of this is me rushing off somewhere and nearly coming a cropper or being late because I’m faffing about with multiple phone screens as I connect and check my mail on my phone – oh yes and not forgetting the embarrassment of appearing rude in the middle of a conversation with a human IRL as I blatantly fumble with my phone for a couple of minutes!
I really believe that battery issues are majorly holding back integration and uptake of wearable technology into the mainstream – we have the capability to make very small components and wonderful inventions, but not so the batteries to power them for useful lengths of time or that do not require a trailing powerpack or brick of a battery in my undergarments!
Ho hum, whilst I’m waiting for useful battery technology advancements, I’ve been looking into energy harvesting & scavenging technologies. Piezoelectrics and electrostatics are a good bet for biomechanical charging as if we can use our bodies and movement such as walking, dancing or just waving an arm to charge small pieces of wearable technology I’ll be very jolly. Plus there’s thermoelectrics that convert temperature differences from say the heat of your dancing feet to the temperature of the floor into an electric voltage (aka the Seebeck effect).
The above technologies would also be fantastic for remote areas and extreme environments where access to the grid or generators is minimal, plus would get a star for cutting down on pollution and energy costs. Unfortunately, I haven’t got very far in finding kits or components available to DIY this tech myself and am looking forward to access to this tech cascading down to peeps like myself soon. I’ve also got a small solar panel that charges a battery for emergency use, this is dependent on having access to sunlight, but unfortunately for me my particular off the shelf solar battery is just frustratingly crap even if I leave it in the summer sun all day, but that’s just bad gadget luck / design, rather than the overarching technology. Doing much better are thin sliver solar cells that are very thin and so are quite flexible and can be worn on garments and are complementary to extreme climates, they seem to have the military interested at least!
Anyway, to sum up, in my humble opinion it’s the military who currently seem most determined to find a solution for developing better battery life for wearables and portable computing, they have the drive and the funding. From my own research, piezoelectrics, electrostatics and thermoelectrics – energy scavenging / harvesting technology is the most fun, green and compelling solution for recharging batteries for low power wearables at the moment, especially in footwear and garments where components can find some space to be hidden away. There’s tons of stuff going on in nanotech improved batteries, better / smaller lithium-ion tech as well as different yarns, fibres, textiles and substrates such as graphene for deployment. Also changes in charging / battery management technology will get better perhaps, so that charging a battery only takes a few seconds rather than hours and will also release a charge more effectively.
Finally, I feel the demand for constant connectivity from consumers will get more urgent as battery drain in mobiles becomes more infuriating to users and drives technology brands to come up with solutions. There are currently teams working in research labs all over the world trying to crack this nut, so I am hoping the results will be fantastic and don’t take too long to get to us – the future, development and uptake of wearable technology depends on it!
For most inventor / makers taking the decision to move from being creative in one’s spare time to doing it for a living is a bit of an expensive gamble and rather daunting. If you’re self employed for the first time, providing a service or going into product manufacturing there are so many questions to ask when taking those first steps, such as: how much should you charge and how does one factor in all the research and development time, what about all the cost of all components, tools and kit (like those giant tin snips)? Plus legal headaches around contracts, agreements, insurance, liability and IP, oh and don’t forget sustainability, thoughts around open source, robustness, longevity and fit for purpose-ness that fun new technology practices bring… Arghh *brainspoldes*! And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, there’s yet to evolve a go-to resource for UK Makers get the answers or advice to these pressing questions.
Personally, I’ve been following links and tips from the myriad of inventors sites (& ignoring ‘inventor promoter’ scams!). For standard business info there’s Business Link & HMRC. I’ve also found my local business enterprise club has some good workshops and seminars on sole trader issues, tax and marketing. Plus if you’re close to London, the British Library Business Centre has some really good free and paid for workshops, seminars and surgeries. There’s also funding and support from initiatives such as the Technology Strategy Board, NESTA and Kickstarter.
So in July I was really pleased to hear about the launch at NESTA of Makers’ Guild ‘a membership organization to support and promote ‘Makers’ of all flavours from artists to technicians, from coders to crafters’, which has been founded by Rachel Coldicutt and Fiddian Warman. It was good to go along and hear talks from fellow makers, inventors and founders, plus chat to like-minded people. They have a website and I’m looking forward to when they have time to populate it with some more info – that wasn’t sarcasm, it takes time to build these resources up, what with having a life, etc, so I wonder if it might be an idea to give a shout to the maker community to get behind it and to submit their fav links, biogs, articles and some guests on the forum to get the ball rolling? [Gah, that’s me with my ex-BBC senior producer hat on]
Anyway, last Friday I went along to the Maker’s Guild’s next event: ‘Makers’ Money – the business of making’ at the lovely Crafts Council offices, where the Makers’ Guild put on three talks by inventors/makers who were getting on with the business of commercially making or supporting makers.
It was really inspiring to hear some personal stories, so if you’re an inventor, a maker or interested is what’s going on in this area, look the following entrepreneurs up!
First up was Jane ní Dhulchaointigh of sugru (patented as Formerol) which is a multi-purpose variant of silicone that is rather like modeling clay and can be used for making, modifying and fixing things – I’ve seen it at Maker Faire, but haven’t had a play with it yet. It’s had rave reviews, TIME Magazine listed sugru alongside the iPad as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010. Jane is as former product design student of the Royal College of Art, where she experimented with mixing various materials together such as bathroom sealant and sawdust, which lead to her realising the potential to develop a useful substance. NESTA Creative Pioneer and angel funding gave her the opportunity to start a business, fund development, design and do user trials. The first 1000 packs sold out in 6 hours and now sugru has customers in 76 countries and a factory in east London. Jane hopes to break even in a year or so.
Up next was Christopher Pett of Makersco, who realised there was a niche for uniqueness and smaller scale production. This service grew from a postgraduate innovation research project at Goldsmiths College. His company makes life for makers and designers easier by taking ideas and designs from concept and working them up to prototyping, testing, analysis, production and supply chain management. They don’t take any IP from makers and work with UK manufacturers and suppliers. Makers also help with marketing strategy, brand guidelines and sales materials. Christopher also runs Pli Design – a sustainable furniture design company, specialising in bamboo.
Last but not least, was Mark Champkins, an inventor who started making things for his family business when he was a schoolboy. His company, Concentrate, is all about making accessories that help children concentrate and be more productive at school, such as a pencil case / water bottle hybrid and a bag that also drapes across a chair to make it more comfortable. He was lucky to build up a good relationship with a buyer at John Lewis who helped him hone his product ideas for their customers. Mark went on Dragons Den, not to get money, but for publicity, but he still got funding. He is also the Science Museum’s Inventor in Residence where he is doing a product range based on their archives. He’s also written a book on celebrity inventions!
After the individual talks a panel Q&A discussion followed where topics such as open product licensing: digital to physical came up and the Awesome Foundation money awards were discussed (there’s a London chapter). A few people stood up and introduced themselves and their ideas, which was very relaxed, followed by a bit of saying hello to friends & making new ones before hometime.
Ada Lovelace Day aims to raise the profile of women working in technology, engineering, maths and science by celebrating their work and hopefully creating new role models to encourage and inspire others to follow a career, study or a hobby in these disciplines.
For Ada Lovelace Day, 2011, I’m writing about my good friend: the multi-talented artist, composer and performer, Sarah Angliss. Sarah is an engineer trained in electro-acoustics, music and robotics and also holds a master’s degree in evolutionary and adaptive systems. Her work combines technology with vintage sound equipment and intertwines spooky science stories and eclectic curiosities into the mix.
She has also been a creator of sound installation pieces for events, exhibitions, and live shows since 1996, featuring robots such as Clara 2.0, the ‘polite robot thereminist’, Hugo, the haunting singing ventriloquist’s dummy, The Ealing Feeder a 28-note, polyphonic, electromechanical carillon and the somewhat scary crooning Edgar Allan Crow – whose eyes you must not look into!
On top of all this, Sarah has also led projects such as Infrasonic, as research project to explore emotional effects of extreme bass sound. Sarah is also a writer and gives talks about vintage technology oddities and poses questions such as “We know we can teach birds to talk and sing. But were birds ever used as primordial, feathered music recorders?” as discussed in her Radio 4 documentary “The Bird Fancyer’s Delight”, which aired in July 2011. Talks include her fascinating talk at TEDx Brighton, “Loving the Machine” which drew connections between two types of dance music which developed a century apart and were created by people were working to the relentless beat of factory machines.
Sarah performs as part of Spacedog with her sister Jenny, compere Colin, plus robot and human guests such as Professor Elemental. Their repertoire includes much spooky exploration into the depths of technology folklore paired with intriguing and inventive use of instruments such as the theremin, spangley water instrument and the saw. In their recent award winning Televisor show they “summon the spirit of John Logie Baird as they perform with flickering projections, created live on their working reconstruction of Baird’s original 1920s televisor”.
There’s tons more stuff I could mention, so please have a peruse through her website(s) to find out more. A perfect afternoon out with Sarah would include having some tea & caek, some rummaging and tinkering in a bag of electronics components (as she’s always hacking at something) and plotting some electronics mayhem – the lady is a proper geek – hurrah \o/
Over the last couple of months I’ve been thinking a lot about teapots…
Me gazing at Teapotty installed at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
I was asked earlier this year if I’d like to create a tech teapot for the Chi-TEK teapot project, by Mz-TEK, who run a community for women who want to learn about and be creative with technology.
The brief is to create a tech teapot for a tea party and exhibition at the esteemed Victoria and Albert Museum in London. If you’re not familiar with the V&A it’s “the world’s greatest museum of art and design” – it is truly a wonderful place and an honour to be invited to exhibit my work there again.
For the past few weeks I’ve been on an odyssey of explorative adventure fuelled by excitement and enthusiasm for a myriad of ideas for tech teapots.
Ideas for my teapot have evolved from memories of tea marketing from my childhood. From the start I wanted to create something that used magnetic fields and magnetometers because I have a really early TV clip in my head of animated tea leaves diffusing tea in a teabag similar to a magnetic field – yes, silly I know, but it’s stuck in my head all this time. Something else I found really evocative about tea when I was wee, was the Tetley Tea Folk tune, I couldn’t get the score for this anywhere, but Ciaran Anscomb kindly wrote me a music routine for my red Teapotty which plays something similar-ish – it’s converted from 6809 machine code from the game “Tea Time” by Pocket Money Software, that ran on 80s Dragon computers.
I have made five variations of my ‘Teapotty’ project over the last couple of months and below are videos of my three favourites…
Above is the version of Teapotty that is currently on show in the V&A and will be demonstrated at the Chi-TEK tea party weekender.
It runs on C code and an Arduino Uno microcontroller and takes readings from a magnetometer that are influenced by neodymium magnets in a cup, plays a tune and informs the servo to move it to a new position. RGB LEDs (with polymorph heart diffusers) also use the readings from the magnetometer to reflect a colour across the RGB spectrum.
‘Fussy Huffy Teapot Bunny Ears’ is a wearable interactive, that also works with an Arduino Uno, servo, magnetometer and neodymium magnets in a cup to reset the position of the tin teapot. Eventually, tin teapot’s downfall was that it became magnetised and I couldn’t easily degauss it.
This Teapotty is a glass teapot on a battery driven turntable illuminated by LEDs. The music Ive used is ‘Modiste’ by Victor Herbert Orchestra CC Public Domain and available at the Free Music Archive.
Teapotty will be interactive and driving everyone mad as part of The Chi-TEK Tea Party during the London Design Festival at the V&A. Apart from during the Chi-TEK Tea Party, Teapotty will also be on show at the V&A over the next three months accompanied by a video of it and other teapots in action. During this time it will be displayed in a cabinet will so will be switched off.
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on the first stage of a project that involves hacking Eric Boyd’s excellent Heart Spark PCB pendant and combining it with a sensor module I’ve made from scratch.
The Heart Spark pulses 6 LEDs to my heartbeat via a signal from my Polar gym chest band transmitter (that usually transmits / displays my heart rate on my Polar wrist watch). The Heart Spark is open source and Eric has kindly made the schematics, code, plus lots of other information available on the Sensebridge.net website pages for the Heart Spark. http://sensebridge.net/projects/heart-spark/
I’m very interested in how sensing technology can display vital signs and how this can be monitored and combined with other tech to give us an insight into our moods, and how our body is reacting to certain situations.
For this proof of concept, here’s the back story / premise I used when considering what I wanted to build and present at Rewired State’s recent (H)activate hack weekend at the Guardian:
“Geeks are very particular about their personal space, so what could be better than a mobile, wearable device that notes their heart rate when someone comes close. Whether you’re cool, calm and collected or get palpitations when a certain someone enters your space, it’s interesting to note how a particular person affects your physicality, whether that be geek love or geek annoyance. It’s not quite your heart on your sleeve, but round your neck!”
For this, I’ve created a heart-shaped proximity detector module to link to the Heart Spark – I’ve named this ‘Flutter’.
To create the Flutter module, firstly I experimented with various combinations of components: an IR proximity sensor, resistor, potentiometer, LED and transistor on a breadboard. The 3.3V coin cell battery that powers the Heart Spark could not give enough output, even when combining with a step up component which boosted the voltage up to 5V to power both the Heart Spark and the proximity sensor.
So I began a period of trial and error with various combinations of batteries, resistors, transistors and twiddling the potentiometer. In the end I gave up fiddling and got my oscilloscope out to find out what was happening. I got some very curious signals from the various battery combinations and step up module I was using, but in the end the solution was to get more juice to the IR proximity sensor. This meant powering it separately and that more batteries were needed. So I settled on a 3 x AA battery pack, for which I’ve made a fabric heart shaped pouch dangling on a twisted twill rope, as it needs to be housed quite close and precisely to the sensor via battery pack connectors.
I have to say, I really feel that powering wearable technology is one of the more irksome things about trying to get this technology into wearables and I’m going to blog about this soon. On that note, the reason I added a 10k Ohm potentiometer to the heart-shaped IR sensor was so that small tweaks to the voltage can be made to the sensor.
To house all the components and with the help of a hacksaw, I made a heart-shaped substrate out of stripboard and coloured it black with a marker pen.
Hacking the Heart Spark – I have hacked Eric’s original code so that the top 3 LEDs on the Heart Spark light up when the IR proximity sensor detects someone in my space. I have some more interesting ideas for the code to work with the Heart Spark in the future, but in the first instance my goal was to get the Heart Spark to acknowledge the IR sensor and light up from its signal.
To upload code from my laptop to the Heart Spark, I fangled an FTDI board (which I usually use with LilyPad Arduinos) with some header pins – so I could connect it to the headers on the Heart Spark. I also soldered two pin headers to ground and positive / signal pins on the Heart Spark, which allows wire connection between the Heart Spark and the Flutter module.
Stage 2 and next steps…
For the next iteration, I’d like to add a tiny camera to this work, set to log periodic photos of who or what situation is in front of the wearer. Plus find a way of grabbing the photo, heartbeat and proximity sensor data from the devices and send to my laptop via a sewable a LilyPad Arduino x-Bee transmitter. Sewable, because I’d like it to become part of the heart-shaped battery pack pouch.
I want to graph the data from the two sensors to plot how many times during the day I get fluctuations in my heart rate when someone enters my space and would place the photos from the camera at appropriate points alongside, to see who had made my heart flutter. I’d use this information to work out my physiological state and reactions to certain situations, and people throughout the course of a day.
Other additions I’ve thought about are to include a temperature sensor, to record if someone becomes hot or flushed in certain situations or people and an accelerometer to assess body language by the user’s posture.
Mass participant uses? I’d love to hold a speed-dating event where all the participants wore the “You make my <3 flutter” device to attempt to determine people’s reaction to each other based on their physical data signals.
Whether we like it or not, we presently live in an economic / political era where we’re constantly told there’s not enough money in the community coffers and so resources will become increasing hard to source. The current UK Government is pushing responsibility for many things back at us via the ethos of Big Society as a way to manage shortfalls in community care – which is pretty depressing.
It is very cool and rather convenient then, that in the not too distant future, wearable technology may give us some help with our lifestyle needs and personal independence. We’ve been talking about ubiquitous computing and the social of media for a while now, but how the streams cross and actually become part of us in a much more intimate and useful way interests me.
For me, this is where shrinking computing components, e-textiles and canny design comes together. We’ve had futuristic looking clothing, research and development departments tweaking devices for years, plus utopian ideas gracing sci-fi and all manner of future gazing documents and films, but in reality we’re only just on the cusp of having the right convergence of media, technology and ideas for this micro, wearable future to start becoming a reality.
I feel that wearable technology is on the precipice of an exciting leap into mainstream culture, right now in my humble opinion, it’s at about the same point of development as personal computing was in the 80s: raw, unrefined, without standards, but new, exciting and full of possibilities – as opposed to the clumsy, bulky and unfocused history that prevailed the wearable tech of the past.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that rapid prototyping technology, 3D printing, the culture of Makers and Hackers, Hackspaces and events such as Maker Faire are also interwoven in the history of pushing experimentation with wearable technology forward.
Makers and Hackers event, 2009.
Empowerment via tinkering, due to technologies such as Processing.org, Arduino, the various flavours of ‘duino microcontrollers, mbed, and particularly sewable microcontrollers, actuators and sensors such as LilyPad Arduino are pushing experiments forward. This is influencing exciting and progressive ideas of what technology means to people and especially into the realms of what people want tailored for them – rather than being antiseptic, turgid or created for commercial gain. All this has made for a liberated approach to creating and thinking what wearable technology could be and can be used for in 2011 and beyond.
Dr Jan Zimmermann demonstrating new, embedded LED embroidery technology at Smart Fabrics Conference, April 2011.
Earlier this year, in April 2011, I attended the 7th annual Smart Fabrics Conference, hosted this year in London. It’s the world’s symposium for smart, wearable and e-textile technology, and draws presentations and attendees from the cream of the commercial, research and academic side of the community. I observed and learnt a lot from this 3-day experience and noted how diverse and yet still fledgling this growing community is. Comparing my three-day encounter I had with this community to that of the Maker community where I am usually to be found, I feel there is quite a difference between the two. Obviously, there is a commercial difference, so I wasn’t quite sure how much detail of the latest tech was being revealed, but it was very good to hear from researchers and academics and of course the snippets from the commercial side. Speakers represented universities, R&D laboratories and big business, and I noted major funding players such as Adidas, US Army, and Philips, to name a few. It was very interesting to note the difference between this and the Maker / Hacker communities in terms of where their priorities and interests lie, and crucially where the development funding is coming from!
So what’s the commercial potential that is attracting so much attention right now? Well, it’s predominantly flourishing in entertainment, sports, fashion, medical, lifestyle, specialist environmental, space exploration and military areas. To elaborate, here are some examples and a smattering of links to the awesome wearable tech that’s out there, with a few examples of my own work thrown in…
Entertainment and performance: well I could almost just say Lady Gaga, whom has been integral in wearing ever-more complex stage outfits which incorporate all sorts of technology, opening audiences eyes and getting them to accept technology as part of her personality and show. But, all sorts of artists and performers: from ballet dancers to, traveling shows and musicians have, for some time, also been incorporating technology into their outfits and performances.
An electroluminescent panel, part of my Ghost Ship Porthole dress.
The Dare Droid is a startling biomechanic cocktail-making outfit that uses medical and other hacked hardware to mix cocktails in exchange for a game of ‘Truth or Dare’. The performance’s Raison d’être is to explore human interaction in public spaces.
Fashion: from temperature and light sensitive inks, LEDs and electroluminescents, to phones, screens and sensing tech embedded in everyday wear, there is a huge potential for wearable technology and e-textiles to become integrated into fashion.
The N12 3D bikini by Continuum is a stunning example of what can be made by 3D printers. It’s made with Nylon 12 and snaps together so there is no need for stitching and the flexible, intricate design of thousands of connected plates is just amazing.
Amy Winters awesome designs feature prints that use thermo and hydrochromatic inks, that creatively use patterns with the properties of the inks to reveal themselves or disappear depending on light and temperature.
In terms of my own work, Neon-Victoriana Queen is an example of an electroluminescent costume, which I’ve exhibited at Kinetica Art Fair and Maker Faire this year. Its inspiration lies in Japanese Harajuku street fashion, of which I am a big fan and in turn has influenced me to create a my own technology based sub-genre: ‘Neon-Victoriana’. Another is the Ghost Ship Portal dress (below), which uses electroluminescent panels.
My Ghost Ship Portal dress, 2011.
Sports: athletes are finding it ever harder to improve human record times. Basically it comes down to the minute shaving off of milliseconds from performances and so monitoring athletes via their vital signs is significant to gaining those new human achievements. Also, from the point of view of broadcasters, they would like to give us ever more exclusive visuals and sounds from the athletes experiences, plus to have reliable communicative technology to give the viewer an athlete’s perspective live and authentically. With the 2012 Olympics coming up the wish list for sports tech is really hotting up!
Textronics have some intriguing sport performance, safety and health monitoring wearables and e-textiles. These range from clothing which integrates sensing fibres for heart monitoring to polymers, with variable resistance properties that can behave as strain gauges, switches and sensors.
Medical and lifestyle: smart textiles and wearables are becoming able to deliver medicines more exactly, hygienically and topically, and to also monitor patients from home or traveling so patients are not confined to long periods of hospitalization or being indoors.
Public groups such as the Quantified Self are devoted to ‘self-knowledge through numbers’ via monitoring themselves. For example, to improve their health, make changes to their lifestyle or monitor their moods by keeping tabs on their personal data. They do this via a plethora of means such as medical monitors, gym equipment, weighing machines, plus keeping spreadsheets, notes and graphs.
An example of medical technology is the non-invasive wearable cardioverter-defibrillator, which can be worn by patients at risk of sudden heart failure, whilst their doctors assess their health and decide what future healthcare plans need to be made.
“You make my <3 flutter" sensing mood wearable, 2011.
Eric Boyd’sHeart Spark is an LED PCB pendant which pulses to one’s heartbeat via a Polar gym heartbeat transmitter chest strap. Eric has made the Heart Spark open source, which has allowed me to study the circuit diagrams and code, which I have in turn hacked its code and attached to a heart-shaped proximity sensing pendant that I have made. Combining the two pendants, I have created a mood device – the proximity sensor detects when someone has entered the wearer’s space and lights up three LEDs on the Heart Spark, which meanwhile pulsates 3 LEDs to the wearer’s heartbeat. My next step is to add a way of logging the data from these moments and visualise it on a graph, to see if there are fluctuations in heartbeat when someone enters the wearer’s space. I’d also like to add a simple camera device to log the data against images. I call this new hack / wearable tech: “You make my <3 flutter”.
Another mood wearable of mine is “Yr in mah face” which uses a temperature sensor to detect fluctuations in heat from breath of someone entering one’s space or a fluctuation in the wearer’s body heat from mood or circumstance.
“Yr in mah face” temperature sensing mood t-shirt, 2011.
Extreme environmental and military clothing: for example those working in extreme or dangerous environments need monitors to tell them when they’re safe or in danger, for example fire fighters, arctic workers, astronauts or those working with chemicals. Similar to the extreme environmental clothing needs, the military want the latest sensing tech in their clothes such as adrenalin sensing fabrics, monitoring, GPS, moisture and heat absorbing clothing.
At last week’s London Quantified Self meet-up, we heard about Hidalgo’s Equivital vital signs monitoring wearable, which was developed and tested by the US military for physiological monitoring in a military environment. It gathers signs of different human states and brings the data together for analysis, for example: how close soldiers were to heat stress, fatigue or no longer being functional.
So what’s next? Well, things are changing very quickly and I’ll probably have a different take on things in another six months (see some of my observations from Smart Fabrics Conf). What I do keep saying is that there’s still no killer app for wearable technology, so in that respect it’s still all to play for! I’m currently researching, keeping long lists of links and ideas, and of course a beady eye on what’s going on out there: in the Maker and Hacker communities, in the research labs, in funding and academia and in business of what we might want, call, use, need, wear and manufacture in terms wearable technology!
Even though I was worn out by all the information and ideas that Thinking Digitalday one thrust into my head, I was up early (for me) and bounced over to The Sage for day two’s talks. Here are the potted highlights of my day via my rambling notes…
Firstly for me, Matthew Postgate, controller of BBC R&D, whose perspective I always find interesting, plus having worked for BBC R&D under Matthew’s leadership I’m always pleased to hear about the deptartment.
His talk, entitled ‘“Who needs telly when we’ve got each other”: how broadcasters will thrive in the information age’, took a look at how broadcasting is shifting from the industrial age to the information age and how this will challenge and change broadcasting as we know it.
He kicked off by saying about his role “It’s about helping the smart guys do the ideas”. Matthew talked about BBC’s mantra – inform educate and entertain in terms of broadcasting being live and having an immediacy, topicality, persistence and a level of quality.
He also showed a couple of demos, one was R&D’s Surround Video project which uses a fish-eye mirror to project video around a room beyond the television, which give an immersive experience of ‘being there’. The other was from a BBC nature programme (AutumnWatch, I think) and I recall Matthew quipping “I never thought I’d show a trout in a presentation!”
He said that new context creates challenges for broadcasters, in terms of:
New entrants
Creative competitiveness
Radically reducing costs
Adopting a global perspective
Re-imagining our relationship with the archive
Understanding a two0way relationship with audiences
- Guaranteeing access: a digital public space
Matthew acknowledged the democratisation and choice of technology and content, which is giving everyone the opportunity to be their own broadcast channel. Looking forward, Matthew commented “This is very much a future that is going to be created by collaboration and the BBC is very much committed to open innovation and open research.”
At the end there was time for a couple of questions, he was asked about
listening to audiences and answered “We always start with the audience in mind’ and went on to say “you used to be able to send in a SAE (stamped addressed envelope) but new media takes this to a new level. Journalists engage with twitter and the BBC is trying to come up with a new language – it’s much more about that interaction.”
Dr Vincent W. Li, co-founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation gave a heartfelt talk about angiogenesis, or new blood vessel growth. Dr Vincent informed us that Angiogenesis helps the body heal wounds and grow essential blood vessels during our lifetime, but during times of disease the growing mechanism can get out of balance and that’s when ‘antiangiogenesis’ can occur. One of the diseases is cancer and he told us most cancers are not discovered until they’re in an advanced stage and hard to treat, so finding ways to stop them growing so quickly and spreading is crucial. Dr Vincent ponders, if antiangiogenesis is the trigger, how do we cut off the blood supply?
The Angiogenesis Foundation is looking at ways to prevent and starve various diseases of by investigating foods that act as blood supply inhibitors to diseases in both humans and animal companions. There’s also another interesting side to this, in communities where access to expensive drugs is prohibitive, eating to prevent or slow down disease is a way of using this concept to help people help themselves.
A list of the good stuff to eat!
In the future Dr Vincent and his team are looking to get a number score system added to nutritional food facts to display a food’s ranking on the inhibitor list and a set of tasty recipes for those who want to follow the diet as some foods, such as tomatoes, work better cooked or combined with others.
I found Dr Vincent’s talk fascinating as although I do like my caeks, I try to follow a healthy vegan diet. I was lucky enough to catch-up with Dr Vincent briefly before he left to ask a question and hear a couple that friends had for him. I wonder if his foundation and The Quantified Self (as mentioned by Walter de Brouwer yesterday) could work together on the numbers system?
Jer Thorp is a digital artist from Vancouver, presently living in New York, he gave a talk on reflecting histories with mathematical design.
He did a live demo of The New York Times Cascade data visualization project that he’s been recently working on. It gives a detailed image of how information flows via social media, so one can track the history of a story or event.
He also talked about his work on the National September 11th Memorial at Ground Zero in New York. He’d been working on it last year when he appeared at Thinking Digital in 2010, but had been under NDA to not speak about it till only recently. Jer was asked to produce an algorithm that would lay out all the names of the people who were killed on September 11th including those at the Pentagon. The 2900 names were to be places around the pools of the site, 1400 of these had adjacency requests for example friends or workers who had died together or were family. The clusters of names requested to be together could get quite large, the biggest was a group of 70 whose families wanted them to be together. Jer had the task of trying to get the names to work with panels, corners that would wrap and panels that didn’t join. He also had to work with typography, plus the groups and departments of people to fit in too. What made it difficult was that there were to be no visible groupings or clusters or noticeable breaks – this proved very difficult. Jer solved the problem, part maths and part typography, with his bespoke algorithm. This kept the architect Michael Arad happy too! The memorial that will be made in bronze will open on September 11th this year.
He finished with a quick demo of Openpaths.cc from the NY Times R&D Lab, it’s a site to track travel history via the location data collected by iPhones. It tracks a path on a map and the user can look back to see where they’ve been on certain dates or show friends and family a location on a momentous occasion. It’s also a research project, so if a user happy to share your data it becomes part of a bigger research piece. Openpaths.cc allows one to revisit up to a year of travel data and people find they have an emotional response to replaying their personal narrative and history. This is quite a nice idea, but as I don’t have an iPhone this site doesn’t work for me – I wonder if there’s something similar for Android?
Tan Le, entrepreneur and co-founder of Emotiv neuroengineering company demonstrated the EPOC brainwave headset and software. Her introduction mentioned EEG as a non-evasive way at looking at how the brain is functioning and how the brain is constantly rewiring itself, learning and can rehabilitate itself – that evidence suggests our synapses are not hard-wired, but are changing all the time.
She talked about how up to now we’ve had to give machines commands to get them to do anything, whereas humans use body language also to convey information. Tan then showed data on her brainwave visualisation software and gave a live demo of it working with the help of a glamorous volunteer, Rob Colling of Internet Subtitling, who put on an spidery looking EPOC brainwave headset. The audience cheered as the headset software showed some activity in Rob’s brain in the form of regions lighting up in different colours on the back projected software, but the real fun started when Tan instructed Rob how to move a box up and down on-screen with his thoughts! Rob has written an excellent post about this experience.
To illustrate some of possibilities for usage of the Emotiv technology, Tan showed a video of someone driving a car with it (slightly scary but amusing) and an artist using it to create mood artworks.
I enjoyed the demo immensely and was amazed to hear from Tan that the headset is possibly affordable and even as she was speaking I was looking up the prices for the developer set and SDK, though hope the contacts on the headset would work with my big frizzy mess of hair – I have some ideas already – watch out!
To round off Thinking Digital, geek comedian Tom Scott performed a live experiment in social media privacy using Facebook, it was quite hilarious and caused a few people in the audience to check their privacy settings.
Afterwards, all that was left to do was skip over to the Baltic for the closing party and it was all the better for Ian Forrester being back this year after missing it due to #hisbrushwithdeath in 2010.
To sum up, I had a very enjoyable Thinking Digital 2012, it was ran like clockwork, it exhausted me as usual and I took some very interesting ideas home with me to think about. Plus I got to catch-up with great friends and made some new ones along the way – sadly there wasn’t any vegan caek – so next year I might bring my own ;-P
Thinking Digital 2011 was the forth annual melding of minds shaped into a conference that brings together what’s new in innovative ideas, technology and thoughts on life in the digital age. It’s run by the awesome Herb Kim and his Codeworks team and is held at the Sage, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.
The conference is popular with thinkers, scientists, makers, entrepreneurs and academics, because it has a slightly different slant to it than your usual tech conference, but through the choice of speakers and topics, it pulls the audience into the conversation, the subjects are not arbitrary, but are relevant to many.
On reflection, last year’s conference seemed to surround the theme of ‘data’: your data, my data, our data – data as a commodity. Richard Titus, who spoke at last year’s conference declared ‘Data is the new oil’ which struck a chord with many of the attendees. This year’s Thinking Digital, for me, was all about sensing things whether that be health, resonating with others, brainwaves, robots or campaigns.
There’s rather a lot to talk about and even cutting my notes down loads, I’ve far too much to say – anyways, I’m splitting it into two posts: day one and day two…
I’m going to start with Walter de Brouwer, as I create wearable sensing technology that responds to input, so his talk really resonated with me.
Walter De Brouwer is the CEO of OLPC Europe; the European Branch of the One Laptop per Child Initiative, discussed the issues surrounding the future of healthcare and how as patients and relatives we can take charge of our own health. He spoke passionately about his personal catalyst for this – a traumatic experience involving his child enduring a stay in intensive care. How the experience of watching machines and nurses logging numerical data over time starts to familiarize the watching relatives with which measurements signify good news and which do not. Walter asked, ‘but why do we only take number measurements when we are dying?’ Indeed, we should be steadily ‘life caching’ medical data ourselves because the medical records our GPs keep are just a punctuated data stream- i.e. they’re very sketchy because they’re not regularly updated and compared, plus are also passed through different doctors over time. He stated ‘ the best way to create the future is to prevent it ‘ – meaning look after yourself now and invest in your personal data to interpret the signs of illness before they happen. Which I feel is pretty sound advice actually, seeing as most major illness’ are only usually picked up by doctors when they are in an advanced stage and hard to treat.
Having access to so much information on the web the patient is becoming a consumer and the do it yourself healthcare movement is getting bigger. We now have access to so many data capturing devices we can keep log of our own health readings, plus if would be totally logical to share and compare this data with our friends to find out for ourselves why some people are happier, healthier and have more energy than others – comparing lifestyles, what we eat, how long we sleep, etc. There is already a worldwide movement leading the way in this self-logging lifestyle, that’s The Quantified Self movement, whose mantra is ‘self knowledge through numbers’ and they log everything they can – for example: blood pressure, weight, exercise, cholesterol, heart rate, arousal and sleep patterns.
Walter fully believes that the globalization of private medicine is unstoppable now and we can shop for the best practitioners who have the least patients, most time and do all your health running around for you – such as booking scans and regular health checks. This is all very nice, but relies on you having the income to fund this lifestyle, as it gets very expensive! This way of running healthcare probably works only for the top earners and of course probably isn’t inclusive to people on benefits or those on low incomes.
Anyways, if you have the income there is a plethora of choices open to ‘Cybercondriacs’ and full body scans are very popular, of course the price depends on where you go to get it done but ranges between 100-700 dollars, India being the cheapest place to go right now. But remember, as mentioned above you can keep your own records and use sensing apps to log them, though the challenge will be how do we and doctors analyse and hang on to all this exponentially generated data? Walter suggests perhaps not in The Cloud: ‘ The Cloud is like a public toilet for your records, you don’t know who’s been there before you!”
So in conclusion, Walter feels your health will become a number – the data is free to gather, but the interpretation by your doctor is not! As doctors begin to prescribe apps rather than meds for health they will become overloaded with data and we’ll need systems to cope with it all. Walter suggested that we may end up with systems similar to an already existing car maintenance system in the US called OnStar – which is a call centre diagnostic type of affair. Ultimately, we are responsible for our own health and should look at our lifestyles and those of our friends to compare what is good for us while we wait for someone to invent a 21st Century version of the Star Trek Tricorder – a complete diagnostic device!
Erin McKean has been a dictionary evangelist for 18 years and is now a founder of Wordnik, an online dictionary that hopes to redefine how we view and use dictionaries. Wordnik has the tag line / definition as ‘Wordnik is a place for all the words, and everything known about them’. It’s a place to find and log words and not just one definition, there are many ways to define and tag words, including sentences, images and statistics. Looking at the Community page http://www.wordnik.com/community, I find tons of words defined by lists such as new words, recent comments, recently favourited, random, trending and previous words of the day.
During her presentation she offered her thoughts on defining dictionaries and word usage, Erin introduced us to the term ‘skeumorph’, which is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artifact in another material” – to illustrate Erin showed us plastic garden chairs that were copies of retro wooden chairs which included a wood grain pattern on the plastic! Erin took us through the pros and cons of using dictionaries in both paper and digital form, such as the problem of new words not showing up quick enough and in the realm of learning she informed us that humans learn words by using them in a sentence, rather than by looking them up. I’ll be interested to hear what people do with the Wordnik API. PS, I was very much admiring Erin’s lovely dresses, so was very happy to find her blog A Dress A Day
Conrad Wolfram, founder and CEO of Wolfram Research discussed the notion of ‘computation for everyone’ – where computation meets knowledge and is democratised so that everyone can use it. He’d like to see governments and organisations make their data more accessible and active online rather than just in papers.
He’s keen to do this by creating new ways that we can visualise data and information and has come up with a computable documentation format (CDF), which uses techniques to show live data and make it more interesting to the viewer. You can play with examples of this on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project.
Conrad is also passionate about maths and other STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) tuition in education and is leading a computer-based maths education summit in London later this year at the Royal Institution – wish I could get a ticket!
Nancy Duates of Duarte Design
showed us via some examples of her studies into cinema, how storytelling is the best way to communicate an idea in a presentation or speech. Her slides showed examples of how using a story framework (visualized as a square wave) showed how verbally alternating between an obstacle and then resolution (or negative then positive) sound bite resonates with the audience and builds up empathy – equating to persuasion = transformation with the listener.
She also talked about injecting passion into stories “when you say ‘I’ve an idea’ – you’re saying you want to change the world!” and noting how we physically react to others when we hear a story. Her three-point framework included the following stages:
During Nancy’s two-year study of storytelling she discovered various frameworks including Freytag’s dramatic 5 point story structure which emerges as: exposition / rising action / climax / falling action / denouncement and how ‘tacking’ (sailing metaphor) your story backwards and forwards holds the attention of your audience. She analysed two powerful presentations to show how her square wave theory works: one by Steve Jobs, launching iPhone and the other Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech – each showed the square wave alternating between a downside/problem and a glowing resolution (what is, what could be). I found her talk fascinating and will definitely look back on it and consider her techniques when I next have a presentation to write.
Ewan McIntosh, CEO, NoTosh Ltd, told the story of the SNP historic election win this year which he co-directed, and they did it via a system that was designed to stop this happening! So how did the SNP win it? When the campaign started the SNP was 15 points behind Labour, but when it ended the SNP was 18 points ahead. They did it by using a ruthlessly planned strategy, much of it using digital media.
He told us “we don’t do enough listening in digital media” and went on to give us some of his tips on engaging voters of all ages, including:
1. Have a strategy – with detail, pace, leadership and be agile – “You don’t need to have a ‘plan’, or a ‘to do list’ but a strategy”
2. Share the same message – be consistent and have a meeting every morning and agree what’s going to be said that day – share the message and make it understandable by people
3. Learn to listen – find out what they like, don’t like and what motivates them -stay relentlessly positive online
“So did digital win votes? Yes it did!” Ewan went on to explain that the ultimate reason for campaigning online was to get people doing stuff offline, which worked and it’s changed the way governments listen to people and that digital is absolutely key to stalking ambition.
Ewan summed up with ‘the SNP campaign has changed not only Scotland’s place in world, but also how government engages with people and how digital can be used as a force for change”. As someone who has done a lot of high-profile project management over the years for the BBC, I was really interested in how Ewan’s strategy panned out across the campaign.
Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot creates live robot theatre performances and is a researcher at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. Heather started by letting Data her Nao robot introduce her and do an amusing comedy performance, which included a little dance at the end.
I couldn’t help but look up the Nao robot and discovered it is programmable in C++, C, Python, Urbi, .Net languages. Interestingly, it’s runs on Linux OS, but is cross platform compatible, and I read Aldebaran Robotics are going to open source some of Nao’s code in 2011 and for those who want their own a public version is aimed to be released in 2012. I noted in the Q & A that Heather was asked how much a Nao robot would cost, to which she replied about 12,000 Euros.
Heather’s other work has included a touch sensitive ‘Sensate Bear’ for use in hospitals to help understand non-verbal communication via touch.
She is interested in how socially accepted robots can be integrated into society and has done work with her performing robot in public areas to analyse how the public reacts to their performance and in turn how the robot’s personality can be tweaked to work with humans – the goal being to help machines understand human traits such as charisma and humour.
Heather also has a portfolio of digital art and is organising The Robot Film Festival in New York in July 2011.
It was a nice touch for Heather to finish on a story about her work on the epic Ok Go ‘This Too Shall Pass’ video, which the audience really enjoyed + a few added factoid morsels about the making of too. I enjoyed hearing from a female engineer very much and would like to hear more about Heather’s research with human / robot reactions, and also her digital artworks.
So that’s it, my epic and rambling round-up of some of Thinking Digital’s day one presentations and talks. I’m going to have a rest now before I launch into day two!
