Reading through Chapter 4 and I'm learning about bipolar montages. A bipolar montage is a way of measuring brain activity by comparing voltage differences between neighboring sensors. The author does a very good job of walking through the ins and outs of the montage, what certain kinds of readings mean, how to identify peaks of negativity (or positivity) in a bipolar montage, and the electrical gradient maps these montages produce.

I wonder if a first step at trying to decipher emotional "footprints" is by wearing an EEG device while watching a movie, video, or show?

I find myself feeling a lot while watching things at home.

And I think a good experiment would be to record the following data while watching a movie or video (the shorter and more "emotional", the better):

1) EEG data

2) Heart rate data

3) Video of facial expressions

I want to acknowledge that I've been all over the place since I started working on this "computer to measure my emotions" project.

It's still my goal. But, building that computer will require a lot of other experiments to get there.

I've made a lot of incorrect assumptions and have tried to do things that did not make sense or were just wrong.

Measuring my emotions in real time? Sounds great. But there are a lot of other things to do before I can do that.

Build my own UI to show my emotions and EEG readings? Again, sounds great. But I don't have the expertise at the moment to have a well informed opinion about the readings or EEG technology.

It's clear what I should focus on: To use existing technology to record and export data – brain activity data, heart rate data, etc – and then, with the exported data, learn about the mathematical/computational techniques to make sense of it, analyze it, and test it for certain "patterns" that may map to certain "states".

A first prototype will not be a device I wear on a daily basis. No. That's WAY to hard to do as my first prototype.

A first prototype is something more like a stationary, uncomfortable series of devices I strap on and mount privately at home while I watch a video and see what kind of data I can capture (and label) during these video-watching sessions.

This is a much simpler thing to assemble. And a simpler, repeatable, cheaper source of data I can use as a starting point.