Drone-guided breathwork

(Work in Progress)

Wisp is an experience design prototype built on a Bitcraze Crazyflie 2.1 micro-quadcopter drone and a PLUX/BITalino respiration sensor.

By synchronizing its movements and lights the user's with breathing patterns, the drone can both lead and follow* the breath in order to encourage, teach, guide, and augment breathwork.

The experience design is inspired and informed by how breathwork teachers work with children.

Drone parts from Bitcraze:

• Crazyfile 2.1
• Crazyradio PA
• LED Ring Deck
• Multi-ranger Deck
• Flow Deck v2
• Extra-long headers

Sensors from PLUX:

• biosignalsplux PZT respiration sensor
• BITalino (r)evolution Board

1. Drill a hole through the LED Ring Deck, as described in this tutorial, in order to make it work with the Flow Deck. Assemble the drone.
2. Set up the Bitcraze and BITalino Python packages. (The Bitcraze GUI client is not needed.)
   • https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-lib-python
   • https://github.com/BITalinoWorld/revolution-python-api
3. Place the drone on a flat surface and leave it still.
4. Make sure you have only one Crazyflie turned on. (Unless you know what you're doing, and have configured things properly.)
5. In wisp.py, select the "exercise" you'd like to execute by commenting out the others in the script body. (It is possible to "chain" exercises.)
6. In wisp.py, if a BITalino-connected exercise is selected, make sure the line which establishes the connection (bt_connect()) is not commented out. Conversely, if a BITalino-connected exercise is not selected, make sure that the BITalino connection call is commented out.
7. Run wisp.py

The drone will execute the following phases after establishing a connection with the script:

2. Pre-flight reset. The LED ring will turn off.
3. Lift-off warning. The drone will be still, and the LED ring will pulsate green.
4. Lift-off. The drone will be still, mid-air, and the LED ring will pulsate green.
5. The breathing exercise. Inhale as the drone rises. Hold as the drone holds. Exhale as the drone exhales. The LED ring will pulsate blue to give count.
6. Denouement. The drone will be still, mid-air, and the LED ring will pulsate green.
7. Landing. The LED ring will turn off.

• Settings > cf_zMin (m): Minimum flight altitude.
• Settings > cf_zMax (m): Maximum flight altitude
• Settings > ts (s): "Time stretch" factor. Specifies how many seconds each "count" lasts, thus determining the pace of breathwork. The "global" time stretch factor ts that is adjusted in the script settings affects all drone actions outside of the breathing exercise. The exercise functions take ts as a keyword arguments with their own defaults. For optimal experience, we recommend setting ts in the settings and passing it to the exercise functions.

Breathing exercises are performed to a count. Each breathing exercise provided in the script has a count and local time stretch factor (see above) specified via keyword arguments, hence they all have defaults while also being adjustable. Each exercise also has a n keyword argument which specifies how many cycles will be performed.

Example: water_breathing(cf, mr, z_min, z_max, count=4.0, ts=3.0, n=3) corresponds to 3 inhale/exhale cycles, each consisting of a 12-second inhale and 12-second exhale (4 counts of 3 seconds = 12 seconds).

Exercises are under development, documentation TBC. Please see source and docstrings.

Documentation TBC. Please see source and docstrings.

Mafalda Gamboa, Mehmet Aydın Baytaş and Sara Ljungblad (2021). Wisp: a Design Case for Temporality in Research through Design in Human-Robot Companionship. Paper for the HRI '21 Workshop Research Through Design Approaches in Human-Robot Interaction (RTDxHRI). [PDF]

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Mehmet Aydın Baytaş, Sara Ljungblad, Joseph La Delfa, & Morten Fjeld (2020). Agent Archetypes for Human-Drone Interaction: Social Robots or Objects with Intent?. In Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Human-Drone Interaction (iHDI 2020). [PDF]

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