Fall 2008 / Team Project / Institute of Design
Canari is a platform-oriented offering that harnesses biometric feedback to help individuals, corporations, and governments measure and respond to stress in 21st century mega-cities.

The problem
By 2030, nearly 60% of the world's population will be living in cities. Stress in these mega-cities will be somewhat unavoidable: mental and emotional stress increase as cities grow, modernize, and become more populous. However, a wide-scale, systemic tool for quantifying and understanding stress does not exist. In the meantime, stress contributes to an alarming number of deaths - in some estimates, over 50%.

The Canari concept
Canari proposes a means of measuring and visualizing stress through space and over time. It will assist individuals, social groups, and the public and private sectors with understanding and ameliorating stress in the urban setting.

A solution for individuals
Awareness is the first step toward amelioration. As a freeware application for GPS-enabled smartphones, Canari collects and analyzes data based on an individual user's voice patterns (e.g. amplitude, frequency, and cadence), along with concurrent ambient noise, to produce a visualization of stress levels. Using GPS, stress levels are correlated with location and movement.

A solution for corporations and governments
Stress data from Canari end-users can be anonymized and aggregated in a centralized database. Visualizing real-time stress data could revolutionize the way cities are planned, serviced, and governed - helping city governments better understand the relationships between urban infrastructure and the human condition.