Friday, March 24, 2006
Skin Galvanometry for the Masses
Filed under: Dermatology
, Diagnostics
When we were kids, legos were blocks. Now people can take lego building blocks and add some off-the-shelf items to make all kinds of medgadgets:
It is just a cut 9V LEGO motor wire and some aluminum foil wrapped around your fingers with tape. I was inspired by talks by Mindfest panelists Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich who talked about using this type of sensor. I've also found out that the Media Lab at MIT has a program called the Affective Computing Research Project that also uses this sensor.It is popularly known as a lie detector, but is also used in Biofeedback conditioning. The theory is that; the more relaxed you are the dryer your skin is and so the higher the skin's electrical resistance. When you are under stress your hand sweats and then the resistance goes down.
This may be the closest most people come to measuring skin conductance -- you know, since we learned lay folks couldn't get access to an e-meter last fall.
But if people really want to build a Lego Lie Detector, wait for them to release the functional MRI kit, first -- that's the future of lie detection.
Via Engadget...
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