— About this Project —

These are two separate software tools for monitoring and learning more about one’s sleep and emotional arousal patterns. The tools combine calendar data, qualitative notes about sleep and mood, and biosensor data about emotional arousal to support self reflection and increased self awareness.

— Background —

Developing emotional self-awareness is a lifelong process Building off the lessons learned through the autism data exploration project, I developed 2 other data exploration tools for EDA data for the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab. One was for exploration of sleep quality data and the other was for tracking one’s own personal physiology data. This data can be useful for understand when one is excited, anxious, calm, depressed, etc.  The personal physiology allows a person to review their physiology data aligned with their personal calendar. The type of insight one might gain from this tool include observations like, “Wow, my EDA was off the charts when I got that email from my co-worker.”

— Design —

The personal physiology tool overlays data from 2 sensors (right and left wrists, red and blue respectively) with a google calendar. The circles represent 24 hours and each degree has a line corresponding to the reading at that time. The vertical bars are arranged according to time along a vertical access. In both formats, the higher the level of the data the darker the color of the line at that time. Drop down menus allow you to choose different aspects of the data to view and compare. A tab allows you to toggle between 2 different viewing modes. You can select a day and use the sliding window to zoom in.

For the sleep data the data is presented in a radial graph, where the degree corresponds to time (like the hands of a clock). You can compare the EDA throughout each night with several measures of sleep quality. A rotating selection window allows you to zoom in to a shorter period of data, which is displayed horizontally at the bottom of the page.

— Process —

Here are some sketches that built on the idea from the autism project to customize for the sleep and personal use cases.