Smartphone app uses sweat to make life entertaining

Washington, May 29 (ANI): Technology firm, Sensum, has come up with a smartphone application that gamifies sweat and makes watching films more exciting.

Sensum pairs a wrist-mounted galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor, made by Dublin company Shimmer Research, via Bluetooth to a smartphone with the Sensum app installed, the New Scientist reported.

The GSR sensor measures how much people sweat, while watching different videos, and transmits all the information to the smartphone which then uploads the data to the Sensum website.

Then people can play back the video overlaid with a graph that reveals just what made them jump.

Additionally, users are given a score to determine how much they engaged with what they saw. People can even compare their score with others.

"People're getting rewarded for taking part," Sensum's Gawain Morrison said.

Morrison insisted that the technique works as he found himself wanting to be sweatier for the first time ever, just so that he could feel more emotionally sensitive.

But the data isn't just collected and gamified, it can be used to alter what people are watching in real time too.

Last year Morrison's Belfast-based production company Filmtrip unveiled their interactive short horror film 'Unsound' at SXSW, which reacted to the audience's excitement - measured by their GSR and heart rate - by making the footage even horrific and the music more tense.

"The physiology of the user shapes their entertainment experience," Morrison said.

Now that the technology has become mobile it can be released on a much larger scale.

"The mobile version allows us so much more room," Morrison said.

"People can do proper deep-level immersion stuff and physiology encryption. If people go to a film with one of these devices on people're going to come out of that with data unique to people. For an alternate reality game tied into a film people then have totally personal physiological encryption."

"People're getting a personal reward for engaging with the film. All the further content is led by how people engaged with it," he added. (ANI)