I began my foray into my subconscious by thinking about dating and attraction. As long as there have been people going out on dates, there have inevitably been bad dates, it’s an occupational hazard, but as online dating becomes more prevalent, it seems to me that there is a ever larger gap in understanding how to verbalize who we would like to meet and have it translate into attraction in actual life. I hope to look at a couple different of physical sensors to try and tease out some hidden indicators that may provide information about the kind of people a person is attracted to. I thought a fun way to bring together my findings would be to create a new take on the mystery date game, with a series of tests to track the user’s pulse and pupil dilation.
For my first round of sensor testing I used the Polar wearlink to detect the user’s pulse. Having previously used a smaller pulse sensor to disappointing results, I was quite happy to find this sensor to be far more reliable and resilient. I had recently seen an article making the internet rounds that talked about the dog breeds that are most likely to get you a date so I thought I would start with make some comparisons of my pulse when I was petting my dog
My initial recording was done walking around my apartment.
I then recorded my heart rate while sitting down and petting my dog, and was really surprised by how different the data was.
In general my pulse was significantly lower, but also included far more high peaks than previously. Other users have reported this as a sensor issue, however I’m planning to do several more rounds of data gathering to see if these results remain consistent.
