Episode 60: The Story of Biobeats and Coding Human Behaviour 🤖

Why do humans ignore their limitations to climb Everest, run multiple ultramarathons to their death? Why do people bring food to funerals? What happens when you measure heart rate variability of French bankers during Brexit? This week, James is joined by David Plans, cofounder and CEO at BioBeats, an artificial intelligence company dedicated to understanding and promoting human wellbeing through preventative mental health. David describes himself as a psychology researcher and entrepreneur - his initial doctoral used AI to create adaptive media systems that imitated and queried the nature of human creativity. He’s given papers and performances at SXSW, International Computer Music Conference, the European Conference on Artificial Life, IRCAM, the Darwin Symposium, and the Computer Arts Society in London. David is also currently pursuing a DPhil in cognitive neuroscience at the Social Cognition Lab, University of Oxford, with Geoff Bird.

Interestingly, David's early research focused on computational intelligence approaches to understand and classify emotion in music making, which forced him to examine the psychophysiology of play, flow and stress. Having built technology (apps+sensors) that attempts to measure stress and interoception in neurotypical adults, he is now investigating the influence of interoceptive awareness on stress, as well as aspects of organisational behaviour surrounding empathy and vulnerability. David actually suffered a heart attack in Brussels airport due to a combination of high-stress, malnutrition and lack of physical awareness of his health declining, so is now most interested in whether training interoceptive awareness through digital forms of biofeedback could contribute to better stress resilience and foster empathy.

david@biobeats.com | biobeats.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidplans/

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