[PD] Heart rate and brainwave sensor

Johannes Taelman Johannes.Taelman at rug.ac.be
Sun Nov 24 17:34:10 CET 2002


Hi,

Citeren arm pdlist <arm_pdlist at yahoo.co.uk>:

> This is my first post, so i'll introduce me. I am a master's degree student
> in multimedia technology and i'm currently starting to work to my thesys. I
> will build a system that can react to a heart rate and a brainwave sensor.
> The system woud interpret those signals and create music and images/video
> according to that. I think that PD would be the ideal programming software
> for that. 

sure!

> The main problem, and where i'm searching for help, is this:
> 
> - do you guys knows about some sensors that i can use to measure the heart
> rate and brainwave? I've made a quick search over the net but i couldn't find
> anything.

biomuse by Atau Tanaka
http://www.gyoza.com/ate/atau/html/
http://www.biocontrol.com/

> - how do i connect those sensors with PD? I suppose they will be connected to
> the computer via USB (my laptop only has USB ports) bu ban PD read values
> from an USB port?

If you make your own usb device you'll need to write your own driver and PD-
object for it. 

> - I would be everything much easier if i could connect those sensors to a
> I-CubeX system, so i would only deal with MIDI data. Do you know any heart
> rate and branwave sensor that can be plugged to an I-CubeX system?

Brainwaves will need a samplerate that is too high (4kHz) for transport over 
midi before recognition. Maybe your soundcard is suitable (in terms of 
bandwidth and accuracy). In that case you'll still need an analog front-end to 
amplify the brainwave signals (an instrumentation amplifier), and to provide 
electric isolation from your laptop.

If you feel like building your own midi-controller interface, there is a cool 
(well-documented, and well-designed) midi controller interface project 
called 'midibox64'. Have a look at www.ucapps.de. This platform should be 
suitable for heart-beat acquisition (along with the right sensor and analog 
front-end).

> The ideal scenario would be to have those two sensors to transmit MIDI data
> to a MIDI interface, but i don't know if this is possible.

It's all possible, but I don't think there is any off-the-shelf solution 
besides biomuse. If you really want to dive into electronics, you could build 
your own using a microcontroller like a PIC (www.microchip.com), or a small dsp 
(eg. analog devices ADSP 21xx series).

good luck,
 j#|@




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