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Of dragons, stress levels and ECGs

A project log for uECG - small open source wireless ECG sensor

It's cheap, doesn't use a specialized heart rate AFE and can blink LEDs with your pulse :)

lucy-sohryuLucy Sohryu 04/15/2019 at 20:040 Comments

We're pretty sure nobody tried measuring stress using Skyrim and an ECG device, so we decided to try it ourselves and give uECG another test drive, now with more participants. Unfortunately, since we didn't have any saves with a cave bear or a sabercat (or a spriggan) going off in your face, we had to use a dragon instead. 

Technically, those were two dragons.

Fascinating trivia aside, we had a go at the dragon du jour in pairs, one person playing and one person  watching, to see how heart rates and stress levels change depending on how involved you are with the game. The results we've got, after cleaning them up, were wide and varied - about half of the players had elevated stress while fighting dragons, but lower stress while watching; the other half had elevated stress while watching the other fight, but got calmer and focused once it was their turn. For someone, it didn't change much at all! 

We've got excellent graphs and Poincare plots coming up in the next log, but so far, we've enjoyed this, and are just itching to test ourselves - and our hearts and minds - further, hopefully with something more stressful than a mere dragon. So far, the results were promising.

Just gonna need more data.

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