July 8, 2005

Biofeedback

Filed under: Technology — mmrobins @ 12:04 am

biofeedback070705
Originally uploaded by mattandkim.

I’ve been playing The Journey to Wild Divine more and am fascinated by the biofeedback. I’m a very visual person so I was pleased to find a utility to graph what’s going on during the game. These graphs are of heart rate and galvanic skin response, or as the game calls it, skin conductance level (SCL). This is basically a measurement of how electricity travels across your skin and is a not very sophisticated, but cheap form of biofeedback. Apparently the game extracts more useful data out of your heart rate variability. The way I understand it, when you’re relaxed, your heart rate is more variable. I’m not sure how to read this very well on the graph however.

For the first part of this graph, I’m just sitting up and watching the reaction. At the point where the galvanic skin response line dips constantly lower, I lay down and begin to take deep breaths until the end of the graph. The galvanic skin response seems obvious to read in relation to my relaxation level, but it doesn’t seem nearly so obvious how the heart rate correlates.

Fun stuff that I’ll definitely be doing more research on. I’d really like to get a device that could measure brain waves as I’ve read quite a bit about the different states of brain activity (beta, alpha, theta, delta).

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