What if people came with care labels? Quantified emotions

It started off as a discussion on Twitter and ended up as a blog post on Zoe’s blog.

Sometimes it’s not always easy to describe how you’re feeling. You may feel over-whelmed, worried that you might make others feel over-whelmed, just not have the words or want to avoid thinking about what it is that is really occupying your mind…

…That’s what got me started thinking about “what if people had care labels like clothes?”.

The concept of people with care labels is a fun and intriguing one. What would your care label say? But it goes deep into the quantified universe.

Are there somethings which can not be quantified? You can go down to the chemical functions, maybe even the watch the neutrons firing away but does that give you enough scope over emotion?  Zoe talks about some apps which allow you to self track mood but as someone who assigns a mood to my self reported dreams with Dreamboard. Its sometimes difficult quantifying it down to a single emotion.

I feel it would work better like a colour picker. I feel a little bit of this and a little bit of that but also a dash of the other.

So less set labels but more mixable pallets. But of course the idea of them being visible still stands. And of course the question of what other people will do once they know how you feel? This certainly would make playing hard to get… a whole different game.

Intriguing and collides right into the work Rain’s been working on, with wearables.

Dreamboard starts a trend

What people dreamabout

Dreamboard I have wrote about a few times before and I have been using the application on my tablet to remember my dreams. But recently people like Simon have been contacting me about shadow which to be fair sounds a lot more like a cross between Dreamboard and Lucidpedia.

Building a community of dreamers sounds cool but very difficult to do. I don’t know if a kickstarter project is the best way, specially when you have the likes of the same information on lucidpedia and many other places across the web. Nope I would suggest something like OKTrends is the way to go. Data like I suggested for mydreamscape would be super valuable to many people including advertisers.

But of course dreamboard are already two steps down that road

Dreamboard, the largest database of dreams in the world – obtained by a patented system for data collection – has officially entered the second stage of its development: the analysis of the great amount of data collected with a scientific and multidisciplinary approach in order to identify patterns of different nature.

Our scientific team has grown, and is now guided by Professor Patrick McNamara, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine and Dissertation Chair at Northcentral University. He has been active studying sleep and dreams for two decades and is a winner of NIH awards to study sleep and dreams, before becoming Chief Scientific Advisor of Dreamboard. He will work with our first Scientific Advisor, Prof. Bruno Bara, M.D., Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Director of the Center for Cognitive Science, Director of the Center for Neuroimaging, Director of the Schools of Cognitive Psychotherapy of Como and Torino.

Impressive stuff, I look forward to some serious findings to come from our aggregated data.

It was also good to clarify the Facebook link, which is just to do a login and not share private data.