This last weekend i arrived at my girlfriend’s house and as i walked in the door i noticed she had a box sitting on the stairs. It was sports monitoring gear to help her in the gym or running. It monitors your heart beat and then can create a series of workouts based on time. I tried it on and could get the watch to register the heart monitoring belt. I wanted just to see my beating heart registering on the watch screen. After pressing a few buttons, i was still unable to get my heart beat showing. Pissed off i scanned through the manual which was complicated with no entry on “press button to see heartbeat”. Perhaps i am stupid user, or perhaps the kit was just too complicated. What i would like is my heartbeat delivered to me all the time.

All the time. Yes, all the time. Why do i want a continual stream of data that contains my heartbeat? Well, after discovering heartbeat sensor technology, it dawned on me that there is presently a distinction between autonomous body data and that produced via cognitive processing(taking pictures, writing text, saving links, search, responding in speech). The data feeds that we have only very recently been able to create are in 99% of occasions processed via the brain. Where is the body? When was the last time you had to remind yourself to breathe?

The obvious choice for a body feed or bleed, would be the heart. We have reasonably cheap technology to measure it. Wait. It’s still locked up. Well sort of. A brief google later. Most heart monitoring kits (sensors and software) are embedded within medical or sports contexts . Only one company i found was porting this to the web, although there must be many more. I suspect that hospitals are using some kind of tool to record heat beat and blood pressure wirelessly. Will anyone help pipe us our heatbeats in a feed format? Sure it will need some hardware but please lets bring it out cleanly stripped from any specific context. Let’s see what people would do with that. It starts to get interesting when we overlay out heartbeat feed over the rest of our attention-stream. Hmm.

(thanks for the CC-Sharealike pics people split-milk radek reks rev dan catt)