Digital Embrace original | Azalea's Portfolio

Digital Embrace

Although social media claims to catalyze social connections, much of the time it only serves to simplify our experiences and lives into manageable, easy to digest snippets. This level of control in online interaction, couple with our body’s release of the “cuddle drug” oxytocin during the act of social media engagement, create an allure that few are able to resist. But how is this potentially affecting the way we interact in the long run? Digital embrace is a data driven experiment that seeks to unveil these shifts are they are occurring.

Role /

Design,

Development

Team /

N/A

Class /

Thesis

Year /

2018

Digital embrace includes a garment created to sense when the wearer is being physically embraced by using force sensitive resistors and an Adafruit Feather.

Once an embrace is detected, the wearable triggers an accompanying iPhone app written with Swift to send the wearer’s pulse, taken with a Polar H10 heart rate sensor, to a Firebase database.

A Python script also scrapes the user’s social media accounts and notifies the same app to send the user’s pulse to the database whenever their posts receive any acknowledgment. There it is compared to the accompanying wearable’s data.

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