User:Jocelynscheirer/Galvactivator

The Galvactivator was a glove that mapped skin conductance to the brightness of a glowing LED. It was the first wearable, washable biosensor. It was invented by Jocelyn Scheirer (nee Riseberg) when she was a PhD student at the MIT Media Laboratory, under the supervision of Dr. Rosalind Picard. Two thousand of the devices were specially commissioned for the SENS*BLES conference in 1999. Participants at the conference received their devices in the morning and were directed to wear them all day in MIT's Kresge auditorium. A camera was fixed on a portion of the audience, and light levels were later extracted to create graphics that correlated the audience's reactions with what was going on on stage.

Subsequent to Scheirer's residence at the Media Lab, several other students in Picard's Affective Computing Group used the Galvactivator to explore thesis projects, or build extensions and improvements upon it (see MIT's iCalm ).

Scheirer founded Empathyx, Inc. to commercialize the Galvactivator in 2006 but was unsuccessful. She also helped co-found Affectiva, Inc. in 2009 as the Director of Operations with some of the Galvactivator technology, though Affectiva ceased producing the Q Sensor in 2013.

The company Bionolux was founded by Scheirer in May of 2014. It currently makes a Beta version of the Galvactivator, called the BE(tm) sensor. The BE(tm) debuted at The Future of Storytelling Conference (FoST) in October 2014.

Jump up ^ "Galvactivator Patent". 2002.

Jump up ^ "MIT Media Lab Galvactivator pages". 1999 - Present. Check date values in: |date= (help)