Skin conductance measurement

[Mark Wieder]

David-

Thursday, August 24, 2006, 5:46:57 AM, you wrote:

> I have been wanting to add a skin conductance measure to an old rev 
> application for a  a long while.  I wanted something portable and cross
> platform, and nothing really seemed to fit the bill.  I then came 
> across the Handwave Bluetooth instrument from MIT.  It is described 
> here:

> http://tinyurl.com/s9l8h

> and here

> http://tinyurl.com/zg3vf

Well, neither of those links is very useful. The first one links to a
page that says "You have attempted to access full membership-level
ZDNet UK content!", and the second one just times out.

Communications between Python and rev apps is fairly easy to work out
if that's where you're heading. If you're trying to duplicate the work
of the MIT Media Lab, I would think the harder part of the job would
be designing and constructing the collector. From the MIT document:

"The core of the HandWave consists of two sandwiched printed circuit
boards, one containing amplification circuitry, and one containing the
Bluetooth module. The amplifier board provides the power connections
and the terminal for the pair of electrodes. The device resides within
an injection molded polypropylene housing, which includes an external
power switch and electrode connection port."

Then you'll have to learn how to program the PIC microcontroller to
access the EDA device data and communicate with the main app. You
could probably get by without the Bluetooth if you could deal with the
limited portability, as that's what would eat up most of the battery
power, but portability seems one of the primary advantages of this
project. All in all, I think this isn't something I'd want to tackle
without having something like the resources of an MIT behind me - note
that this project was a Mechanical Engineering thesis.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net