October 11, 2005

Sensory Threads

Proboscis and Birkbeck College Computer Science Dept have been slowly cooking up a collaboration over the past 18 months. Two PhD students have become closely invloved in developing the Urban Tapetries software platform and we are collaborating closely on the final stages of the Feral Robotic Public Authoring project to build some new sensor and location sensing platforms to communicate environmental data back to UT.

Sensory Threads is the title of a project that was shortlisted for a 2005 Wellcome Trust Sciart Award. We are now exploring other funding avenues and partnerships and hope to kick the project off in early 2006. Sensory Threads aims to stimulate and inform a public debate on how personal biosensor data is collected and used in biomedical science. It will combine an artistic with an evidence-based approach, building and testing a prototype body biosensor network that uploads data to Urban Tapestries. 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.

Posted by Giles Lane at October 11, 2005 02:34 AM