NaviGadget

brits trace their arousals using GPS and Google Maps

Apr 18, 2006 gps navigation, misc news

Yes, you heard it right. A project by Christian Nold, using a commercial GPS device, a galvanic skin response (GSR) data logger, and Google Maps can put your emotions on the map. As crazy as it sounds, the project does serve a purpose. It plans to construct maps that can show us (or the crazy Brits) where as a community we feel stressed or excited.

GPS

In addition to the Galvanic Skin response the device also records the wearers location every 4 seconds. This position data as well as the arousal data is stored on a large EEPROM memory chip with 256k of storage which give me about 48 hours of recording – more than enough for my purposes.

Mapping

After the data has been downloaded the data is visualised using one of 3 different mapping systems.

The first is a custom a custom built software that functions like a data-driven slideshow which continuously zooms and pans through every participants walk and at intervals builds up a communal map of all the tracks. This software requires scanned maps.

Secondly, I use Google Earth to visualise the tracks after they have been converted to GPX by my custom software. The advantage of this that it is 3D, the map data is extremely high resolution and included with the application.

The topic was on NPR today and they were discussing whether this could be useful in the future for city planning purposes and so on. Maybe soon we’ll have 3 options on our navigation devices: Shortest route, fastest route, and happiest route.