So I’ve been waiting for a while for some complete GSR sensor units (That’s Galvanic Skin Response, in simplistic terms they measure how “sweaty” you are) to arrive at work. These are for an Undergrad Project team to use, so it’s rather frustrating for the supplier to be soooo slow.
Thankfully, a different supplier was really prompt in sending a couple of GSR sensor boards to us that use the Grove platform. Unfortunately I don’t have any Grove shields for the Arduino so I had to do a quick bit of tinkering with a breadboard to get it hooked up. Actually very simple in practice, theres a +ve, ground and analog signal wire that you need to set up with the Arduino – then it is just a matter of reading in the values from the analog pin.
Just about visible on the Grove unit itself (in the photo below) is a little potentiometer that you can turn with a small screwdriver to adjust the sensitivity range of the resistance being recorded.
Once that was up and running it was then a case of getting Unity reading information over the SerialPort (as the raw analog values were being sent via Serial Comms from the Arduino). Some really useful code for this was found here: http://www.dyadica.co.uk/unity3d-serialport-script/
A quick bit of hacking with the Unity LineRenderer later as a means of visualising the data and there you have it – Unity getting biometric data from an Arduino!
Neat.
