1/2’s Preparation
This week was pretty much dominated by our team preparing for halves. We made four major iterations on our original slide deck and met multiple times with both Heather and Dave to refine the story of our progress. Working on our halves presentation highlighted where our team was lacking on our designs. After some group discussion, Constanza came up with a game plan to better define our guest’s meditation experience.
User Experience
Constanza began mapping out the user journey and creating a master list of potential biofeedback indicators. The list is split into several categories including Plants, Animals, Abstract, and Territory (which constitute environmental changes). The next step will be triaging these indicators based on resource requirement, concentration, position, and the biometric mapping type.
Biometrics and Sensor Integration
On Friday, Gillian and Zibo met with Patrick, a pranayama meditation guide and Equa Health researcher, to discuss using the Hexoskin for biofeedback integration. One major limitation that we have with the Hexoskin is that it requires skin-to-shirt contact in order to detect heart rate and detect HRV. On the other hand, the Hexoskin could potentially be used for tracking respiration rate without skin-to-shirt contact. This is because the Hexoskin measures inhalation and exhalation by volume expansion in the chest and stomach. In the video below you can see how the Hexoskin visually maps breathing in the chest (blue line) and stomach (yellow line). This opens up further biofeedback integration options for breathing, as we can track “where” a person is breathing from. We also got in contact with Hexoskin themselves about potentially buying an additional shirt.
On Saturday, Gillian and Zibo met with Patrick in person to pick up the Hexoskin, go over how to use it, and receive Equa’s development information. While trying the Hexoskin on, we confirmed that the Hexoskin could be used over another shirt to detect respiration rate. Because of the ease of wear for playtesting that respiration rate provides, the team has decided to solidly pivot towards using respiration rate as our central biofeedback mechanism.
Sound Design
Faris and Gillian recorded the “Hear” and “Feel” sections of Equa’s meditation this week. After experiencing some mic troubles in the last recording session and meeting with Dave Purta the week prior, this week’s recording session went off without a hitch. The sound quality and background static is in significantly better shape than it was when recording the “See” section of the lesson.
Team Building
To blow off some steam this week, the team decided to use an activity taught in our Improv class last semester. We made a collective drawing of a person, where we took turns each drawing a single line. We also drew cartoons of each other for a mock team photo.
