I'm building an app that records biometric data while watching emotive scenes in a movie. Why? Because I'm curious to know if there are recognizable brain activity patterns hidden that correlate with human feelings.

For these movie-watching experiments I'm capturing 3 biometrics in 5min segments of the movies:
1) Videos of my face

2) My heart rate (in beats per minute, bpm)

3) My brain activity (???)

Yesterday, I built a video recorder. I can connect an external camera (an Opal Tadpole) to my computer, and my app uses that camera to record and create mp4 videos.

Today, I'm going to focus on building a heart rate monitor. I'm going to try to connect to my Polar H10 using Bluetooth and capture my bpm for 1min.

Like the video recorder, I want the heart rate monitor to have a record button. Which will start a recording session. And then, at the end of the recording, I will be able to compile the session's data and show a graph of the data.

Let's see what I can do in 1 hour.

In the last hour I was able to connect to my Polar H10 using bluetooth. Stream bpm data in real time to my NextJS app. I created new db tables to save bluetooth devices, pair them, and manage them from a settings dialog (or popup).

Next, I'll build a heart rate monitor recorder to create heart rate sessions.

Let's see what I can do in 30mins.

It was way more than 30mins. But...

I finished building the heart rate functionality. I can live stream my bpm data and record sessions of my heart rate activity.

The last step will be to build the brain activity functionality. I need to live stream my brain activity data and record sessions of my brain activity. I'm not exactly sure yet what data I'll store for each session, but I'll see what I can extract using my Bluetooth connection.

It's very easy to extract the heart rate activity data from the Polar H10. And implementing the extraction logic was quite straightforward. I hope to use a similar approach to extract whatever raw data the OpenBCI Ganglion emits.

I built the base UI to record brain activity. Tomorrow morning I'll build the db models and stream data from my OpenBCI Ganglion.