Where do I feel?

written

Woulnt it be cool if, as affective scientists, we could begin to measure emotions in the real world? Every day we get a little closer to that ideal.

In the past few years, a lot more people are carying the internet around with them. This doesnt just allow people to check email/facebook on the bus, but also opens the door to a number of cool new experiments.

For example, I can give emotional updates via post, text, or twitter. If I were bold enough, I could brodcast my location with services like google latitude. Not only that, but there are apps that use the camera in your phone to measure heartrate and heartrate variability. More recently, I was able to play with a new toy that pushes this one step further. I got a chance to walk around with an affectiva sensor, which wirelessly measures my skin conductance for long periods of time. I wore it like a wrist-watch, while it measured my electrodermal activity (EDA; I think mostly the tonic portions) over the course of a few days.

In addition to being able to look at the timecourse relative to what was going on in my life, since I keep track of where I am using google latitude, I thought it would be cool to see a map of my EDA levels. As a proof-of-principle, I wrote some python code to match my EDA data where google latitudes XML file said I was. Here is what I got!

EDA Map

I look forward to the future, when we can all take advantage of these tools. :-D

Questions? Comments? As always, feel free to contact me.