Stand up. Sit down. Walk. Run. Sleep. We engage in these activities everyday (well, maybe not running), but how much do we know about ourselves and our bodies while we’re in the midst of them? Are you standing up straight? Are you slouching at your desk while you read this sentence? In this Toolmaker Talk…
Aarti Vashisht has done some interesting QS-related work for her MFA at Art Center College Design. She designed some prototype sensors that could be worn on our bodies in the future, and interviewed people to learn their thoughts on how these integrated sensors might impact their lives. This is an image of the sensors she…
Imagine if you could switch your music track while running just by tapping on your hand or your arm. What if your TV and lights knew when you had fallen asleep and automatically turned off. Or if doorknobs were as smart as your current tablet touchscreen and you could send messages to people before they…
Simon Frid moved to California last year because his data told him he was smarter here than in New York. Well, not really. But this funny story begins his journey of figuring out how to track one of the simplest things that we don’t generally know about ourselves: our own posture. Simon designed a wearable…
Alex Grey is developing a better kind of muscle sensor, to help people see their muscle activity patterns and change behaviors like typing or running to be more effective and less painful. The sensors are wireless, stick to your skin, and can measure different kinds of muscle activity including arm/leg (EMG) and heart muscles (ECG)….
Dave Kil runs marathons. He has detailed records of all his workouts for the past year and a half. Recently, though, he started feeling that running was getting boring, and he wanted more variety in his workouts. So Dave helped create sensors that can monitor different activities passively, including cycling. He also added high-intensity training…
Ted Punt talks about a device developed by TNO (Dutch Institute for Applied Science) to measure vital signs from people at a distance of up to 10 meters. Heart rate, body motion, and respiration are measured continuously and wirelessly with this device, which should be on the market within a year. He goes into some…
This is a first for us. At our Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup this week (slides available here), we had so many wonderful folks donate and buy QS t-shirts that we decided to use the money to fund an exciting project on Kickstarter. It’s an open hardware project called Pulse Sensor, by Yury Gitman and…
It’s been almost 2 months, but on the sixteenth of May we held our third meetup of QS Amsterdam. We moved our venue again to the Waag which kindly offered us their space. Our first speaker discovered a strange pattern in his listening habits according to Last.fm. It turns out he stopped listening to music and…
With the first QS conference 32 days away, we’re excited to announce that Eric Boyd will give a keynote on “New Sensors and the Frontiers of Self Tracking.” Eric is an inspiring hacker who constantly pushes the boundaries of what is possible using the latest sensors and tools. A long time member of the Bay…
Michael Doherty talks about the Open Source Real Time Mobile Sensor Platform he is developing, which flexibly connects a wide variety of sensors to online databases. He wants to make mobile tracking more accessible, and imagines people using it with their own sensors, as well as kids using it to collect environmental data on class…
Amy Drill is working on a new innovation in applying sensors to sports, specifically muscle training. In the video below, she talks about the spectrum of body metrics that are available now, and how measuring muscle fatigue and giving people real-time alerts can help prevent injury and increase performance. Amy’s startup, SensorySport, integrates lab-grade sensors…
Eric Boyd, a long-time QS member and now part of the Toronto QS Show&Tell meetup group, has a new project. It’s called HeartSpark, and it’s a heart-shaped pendant which flashes little LED lights in time with your heart beat. HeartSpark and Eric (video below) were featured on Engadget today – congrats! Thanks to @faisal_q for…
A few months ago I was fatigued and decided to try a more rigorous sleep hygiene routine to see if it would help (it did). To make the experiment fun I thought I’d look for a nifty iPhone app to track the data. After a fairly extensive search I noticed that most of the tools…
Last March some UC San Diego researchers published a nice paper called Thick Film textile-based amperometric sensors and biosensors that gets into some of the details of printing biometric sensors on clothing. In this charming video, a UCSD undergraduate prints a sample biometric sensor on fabric. Below is an excerpt from the UCSD press release…
I was catching up on reading Seth Roberts blog this morning and I noticed this post he made in January about seeking cleaner air in his apartment in Beijing, where he was working for several months. Seth describes a couple of different cleaning approaches, and makes the point that measuring your personal environment is not…
