Today I finished reading Jonathan Sadowski's The Empire of Depression. It's such a great book. It provides a good historic context for the challenges we face in defining, diagnosing, and treating mental health disorders. Specifically depression. There is so much work to be done in this field. So much work to do to align on what these mental disorders are, how to define them, and how to start measuring progress to help people stop suffering from these painful mental states.

After reading this book I drafted a brief hypothesis of my vision to quantify brain activity using a 2D brain activity map. The changes in electrical activity in the map over time could be used to identify patterns, and from those patterns, extract emotional data.

This is a hypothesis. And very much a fantasy right now.

But I hope to continue learning about EEG technology and the physics and math required to decipher these patterns to build a device I can wear in the future that will log my emotional activity throughout the day.

I continued working on the web app I'm currently using to connect my OpenBCI Ganglion via Bluetooth to measure electrical activity in microvolts and display those measurements on the web app.

I designed and built the UI several weekends ago while in Texas, and today I picked back where I left off. I built a web app that simulated connecting to a device via bluetooth and then display a microvolt value.

Today I built the logic to actually connect to my Ganglion device via Bluetooth using the Web Bluetooth API and decompress the data stream into microvolt values using the OpenBCI documentation.

I was able to connect the UI but the values aren't showing yet. How do I know? Because the moment I disconnected the sensor attached to my forehead, the data stream continued to show values above 0.

I was expecting 0 volts to be coming from that sensor...

So I'll continue to work on this as soon as I get a chance this weekend.