Blog 5 - HRV Biofeedback Brainstorming

12/04/2024


Now that the bulk of the technical work for the project has been covered it's time to look into how the team can give Bio-Feedback from a users HRV Value.

During today's class we explored some of the different use cases for biofeedback with the newfound knowledge on the MQTT design pattern, IFTTT and the HRV code base. 

The system would likely need a pacer of some sort as well as a visual that the users HRV value can be mapped to. 

One idea that was proposed was a Micro bit HRV water feature that would be found somewhere like a garden center.

Water feature

This idea was further explored and we found some interesting videos on different Wave motion machines, some using motors as a paddle to generate waves while other used gravity by moving the container of liquid itself.

However the best example that was seen was from the Hughes Wave Machine pictured below.

From taking a look at how these machines were made it was found that it was simply a 50/50 mix of dyed water and baby oil.

Hughes Wave Motion Machine


Another example of BioFeedback that was proposed was to use a Children's teddy to act as a pacer, the teddy that was chosen has a built in motor that simulates the teddy taking deep breaths. This can be combined with the wave machine to give the user a fully immersive breathing experience with both a pacer and a visual to keep the user focused on their breathing.

Fisher Price breathing otter teddy


19/04/2024

After the in-class brainstorming session Hasan pitched the idea of making a more permanent brainstorm whiteboard. 
This was done using Miro

From this the scoping work had been decided and there would be two sub teams for the HRV project each team had their own artifact to create the first being an iteration of the Wave machine and another team that made a HRV enabled teddy that would breath in and out according to the users HRV.



This would leave the overall team with the Teddy and Wave machine artifacts that a user would be able to measure their HRV with while looking at the visuals of the wave machine or breathing in sync with the teddy to relax oneself.

Once the work was scoped out the plan was to come back in for a lock in to take the project from start to finish over a period of two days during the 7th and 8th of May. This gave us plenty of time to source different materials needed to bring the project to life as well as moving the workload to later in the semester to give everyone time to finish other deliverables.


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