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Project

Every Sign of Life

Every Sign of Life challenges assumptions about how we might think and feel about personal health monitoring. It is an exploration of how to make information collected by personal health-monitoring devices fun and engaging, and consequently more useful to the non-specialist. The approach is to design and build computer games based on such information. The goal is self-efficacy; to implicitly make people take care of their own health by altering their habits and by health-aware planning of their lives. This work tests the hypothesis that fun (the fun of learning, achieving, competing) is a way to achieve this goal. One research focus explores the basic architecture for personal health monitoring systems, which has led to a new approach to design of sensor peripherals and wearable computer components called "Extremity Computing." This approach is used to redefine biosensor monitoring from periodic to continuous (ultimately saving data over a lifetime). Another research focus explores adding implicit biofeedback to computer games, which has led to a new genre of games that straddles the boundary between sports and computer games called "bio-analytical" games.