Giles Lane came out with a new initiative to build on top of the urban tapestries platform. The idea is to build a wearable biosensor kit that should interface with a mobile telephone and transfer rhythmically some parameters to the urban tapestries system so that the parameters can be mapped to a certain part of the city. Basically the idea is to use the mobile as a remote and distributed sensor to gather environmental/personal data.

Sensory Threads aims to stimulate and inform a public debate on how personal biosensor data is collected and used in biomedical science. This project will combine an artistic with an evidence-based approach, building and testing a prototype body biosensor network that uploads data to Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries spatial annotation system. This will allow participants to map experiential and emotional annotations to their readings – adding a whole new layer of sentient knowledge to machine data. It is intended to demystify how data is collected, what it produces and how we can correlate it to other factors affecting health such as environmental pollution.

Connected pasta: I wrote already of this concept here.

UPDATE from Giles: What Sensory Threads will focus on is the ethics of using (and developing) these kinds of systems… how will it affect us socially and culturally — what are the implications of correlating the machine data of the sensors with the human/sentient knowledge of place/context/situation etc…

Tags: ecology, environment, Exploratory Data Analysis, field tools, hack, maps, psychogeography, urban exploration