Body Metrics

What it is. A permanent exhibition at The Tech Interactive (San Jose) that gave visitors direct, hands-on access to wearable physiological sensors and used the resulting data as the substance of the experience. Open since 2016. AAM Gold MUSE Award (2016). Presenting sponsor: Kaiser Permanente.

The problem behind it. A wave of consumer wearables had landed but most public framing of them was either consumer-marketing (steps, sleep, heart rate) or science-press (cool studies, abstract). Almost nobody was making an experiential bridge between the body’s signals and what someone might do with that information. The behavioral-science research existed. The design language for translating it to the public did not.

Our primary motivation was to develop this exhibition to improve the health and wellness of our community. Body Metrics stands apart from most health exhibitions because of The Tech’s strong emphasis on making and doing.

— AAM CFM essay on the Body Metrics exhibition, 2015 (Romie co-bylined as Curator / Project Director, Health and Biotech).

What I did. My role on the Tech Interactive side was Concept, Development Lead, and Evaluation. The Tech’s exhibitions team built the project across about three years with a roughly 50-person cross-functional staff. The interactive design and build partnership was with Local Projects in New York. Heart-rate variability, electrodermal activity, breathing patterns, and attention measures were rendered into visualizations visitors could see, manipulate, and reflect on. We paired direct biofeedback (try to slow your breathing, watch the line change) with structured mindfulness prompts and small-group exercises. Content partnerships came from academic and industry research labs across the wearable-biometrics field.

Station case study. Digital Reflection is documented on its own page: the station that rendered a visitor’s signals into a personal radial profile and then put it next to other visitors’ for a similarity reading.

SensorKit. The iOS app paired to the wearable. It rendered a visitor’s state across a radial wheel of self-state, social context, activity, and affect terms (focused, engaged, present, distracted, crowded, grouped, paired, alone, talkative, social, active, hyper, ecstatic, serene, tense, anxious, content, and so on), and served as the main visitor-facing surface for the wearable’s data. Perhaps the most iterated software in the museum, because the read-back surface had to teach itself, on first contact, what the numbers meant. My role beyond project lead was design research, concept development, and interaction prototyping.

The Cricket. A bluetooth EXG sensor (EMG / EEG / ECG depending on placement) developed with Somaxis, redesigned for museum use. The industrial-design problem was that a research-grade biosensor has no obvious affordance for a first-time visitor. The adhesive-bandage metaphor we landed on gave visitors a familiar open / place / read sequence: open the package, place it on the body, see your signal show up on screen.