Category: Stuff

More fun with smart bulbs, this time the Ilumi

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They say “third times the charm”? It’ll have to be at the rate I’m going through smart bulbs. After the disaster that was the C by GE that I tried over the summer I bought myself an Ilumi LED Smartbulb. I saw a demo of the Ilumi in action and thought it would be a perfect fit for my office. Sadly despite the bulbs positives, (1) high lumen output and (2) range of lighting configurations (e.g. RGB), it has several flaws which make it unusable, at least for me.

Ilumi Smart Bulb
Ilumi Smart Bulb

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Dumb Smart Bulbs

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I recently picked up some C by GE smart bulbs at the Maker Faire in DC. The GE stall was giving away samples and I managed to get both versions of their smart bulb line: the life and sleep bulbs. I’ve been meaning to pick up some smart bulbs in order to experiment with dynamic lighting, specifically mood controlled lighting and this seemed like the opportune moment to try it out.

C by GE Smart Bulb
C by GE Smart Bulb

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Musing about the Muse’s Signal Quality

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I’ve been looking to buy a new consumer grade EEG headset to replace my MindBand. While I like the form factor of the MindBand it’s limited to a single channel of EEG. There were murmurs of a 2 channel EEG at the time the headset was purchased, back in 2012, but I never managed to find where to purchase it, and it was possible the adverts were confusing the electrode count with the channel count.
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Rhythmanalysis – Short Essay

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Last year I consulted on a Creative Exchange funded art project called Rhythmanalysis. The project was interested in the artistic expression of the biological rhythms of people from different work cultures based in Liverpool. In this case employee’s from Minsky’s hairdresser’s and Sony’s game testing lab. The project was exhibited at FACT Liverpool and has recently published a report about the venture. The report includes a short essay I wrote based on my involvement with the project which I’ve reprinted below.
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More fun with physiological data at the funfair

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Before I went to Southport’s Pleasureland I went to Blackpool Pleasure Beach (see earlier post). Unfortunately the sensor I was using was dislodged and the feature I was interested in, namely heart rate, was lost. While Blackpool ended up becoming a trial run for the next deployment I did manage to capture some fun breathing and g-force data.
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Poincare Plots at the Funfair

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Recently I’ve been looking at different ways of visualising physiological data, and have created a Poincare plot of a funfair ride at Southport PleasureLand I sampled last year. This form of visualisation plots current and successive heartbeats as x, y coordinates, so if a subject’s heartbeat was successively 70, 80 and 75 beats per minute (bpm) we would plot (70,80) and (80, 75) on an X-Y graph. In the instance below I’m plotting heartbeat activity as inter-beat interval which is the time between beats rather than the beats per minute. I’m particularly fond of Poincare plots as its easy to grasp a subject’s heart rate variability from casual inspection. At rest a subject’s heart rate variability should be high, and so individual beats should be spread out over the graph in somewhat of a noisily fashion. When stress is applied heart rate variability decreases and beats cluster.
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