The Stress Vest

Throw down your hairshirts and get with the stress vest –a wearable electronic system being developed by biomedical scientists at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.

The vest is fitted with numerous, tiny electromyography (EMG) electrodes that can calculate your stress levels by monitoring the level of electrical excitation in your muscles.

The electrical signal produced by your muscles changes with your stress level. So, if you’ve been overdoing it at work (or prayer), for example, the sensors will register heightened electrical excitation and pass the signal to an electronic analysis kit via a network of tiny conducting metallic fibers.

The vest can then inform you to take a break –or make another espresso.

Researchers claim that sports coaches could use the stress vest to determine whether athletes have reached their performance limits or still possess energy reserves. The stress vest could also contribute to safety at the workplace –for example, being used to ensure that workers do not lift loads that are too heavy for them.

The vest could also be used to control characters in computer games by selectively tensing the torso muscles –effectively using your real-world chest in place of joystick controls, claim the researchers.

The team behind the stress vest identified some interesting specific design challenges presented by wearable electronic devices: the garments have to be resistant to water and perspiration, the electric conductors must not fray (even after repeated laundry cycles), and, for comfort’s sake, the sensors must be “no larger than buttons.”

Please note that ‘The Button’ is not an official scientific measure.

“The IZM researchers have [...] developed stable metallic fibers, watertight connections and durable sensor buttons. Their task over the next few months will be to integrate the analysis electronics,” says Torsten Linz of the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin, a project partner.

Based on material from an Alphagalileo Press Release, 8/7/2008.

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The potential application of this technology to video games is particularly interesting. Atari tried using EMG readings in the ill-fated MindLink console in the 1980s (albeit taking EMG readings from the skull rather than from the torso). Testers reported tiredness, headaches, and nausea after using the devices. Plus, they just didn’t work very well as controllers.

Besides the fact that the stress vests’ electrodes are in a different position on the body, what evidence is there that this device will work any better?

If your employer asked you to, would you wear a stress vest? (Remember: it will work both ways, alerting your employer when you’re being overworked, but also sending out an alarm when you have dozed off at your desk.)

It’s not such a fanciful question: wearit@work is a European project to develop new wearable computing technology to “support the workers of the future.” Four different pilot studies –in the fields of healthcare, emergency rescue, aircraft maintenance and production management and training– are already underway.

Science doesn’t know enough about the empirical structure of experience to describe it using anything other than vague labels based on broad definitions. So, given the current state of the technology (and our understanding), the claim that a machine can accurately determine psychological or emotional states is a bold one.

Further, the stress vest could be adapted quite easily so that it could send you an alarm signal when you are not stressed enough; ushering in an age of high-tech penitence and self-mortification in the process. Maybe that’s what the researchers at the Catholic University had in mind all along.

You have been warned.

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There is lots of interesting work going on in wearable electronics and smart textiles –a topic I’ll return to in future posts.

For now, here are some useful links:

wearit@work
http://www.wearitatwork.com/

Fraunhofer’s wearit@work website
Researchers at Fraunhofer are developing wearable computing solutions for emergency response forces, in close association with the Paris Fire Brigade (BSPP).
http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/projects/softwaretechnik/wearit_en.html

A Wired News article I wrote last year about using brain-computer interfaces to control computer games:
BCI – Brain to Control Games Directly, Maybe Vice Versa

Smart Textiles
http://www.smartextiles.info/

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