Wearable Sensing
To track social interactions in larger groups of people, it is critical to record their movements. We have used a variety of wearable motion sensors and physiological sensors in this project to quantify the details of how people interact. Two types of sensor were used: head-worn motion trackers (Mbient MMR), and wrist-worn movement and physiological sensors (Empatica E4).
We used these wearable sensors in three ways:
We used these wearable sensors in three ways:
- Live streaming for performance: data on the head movement of the actors and several members of the audience was live streamed and presented as a visualisation on stage. The live data was also used to create a sonification of the event, with data on individual head movements blending together to create a unique soundscape through sections of the performance.
- Recoding of audience and performer movement: detailed movement data from the actors and around 30 audience members was recorded for further analysis. The goal is to use this data to investigate interpersonal synchony between the people watching a performance, and those on stage. The ways in which people move together (or not) reveals much about their social situation and their interpersonal relationships. In a previous work, we explored ways of using wearable sensors to guage the interpersonal engagement of autistic children taking part in theatre (see links below). Deconstructing The Dream widens that study to explore this type of movement-based engagement within a larger, mixed, group.
- Recording of physiolgical signals: A third component of our work was to record and analyse the electrodermal activity (EDA) of selected audience members as they observed and took part in the performance. This was done using Empatica E4 wrist-worn sensors, and reveals information on the stress-response of participants as they prepare to take part in on-stage activities.
Find out more
You can read about our earlier work on wearable sensing, theatre and autism in this article. For more details on that work, the full published paper can be downloaded here.
Ward, J.A., Richardson, D., Orgs, G., Hunter, K. and Hamilton, A., 2018, October. Sensing interpersonal synchrony between actors and autistic children in theatre using wrist-worn accelerometers. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (pp. 148-155). ACM
Ward, J.A., Richardson, D., Orgs, G., Hunter, K. and Hamilton, A., 2018, October. Sensing interpersonal synchrony between actors and autistic children in theatre using wrist-worn accelerometers. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (pp. 148-155). ACM
