Adding game mechanics to people's perspiration is one of those ideas that's so weird that it just might work. Dublin based hardware providers Shimmer and Belfast born tech firm Sensum are betting on it with their new smartphone app called Sensum, which quantifies your sweat to make film watching more insightful.

It works using a sensor (called a Galvanic Skin Response sensor) that measures sweat levels, and is worn by someone while they're watching a film. Once the film is over, all that sweaty data is sent to the Sensum phone app via bluetooth, and then transferred to the Sensum website for correlation. Once this is complete, the app can then chart your personal sweat-o-meter, and overlays the video you've just watched with this perspiration data. The result is a chart telling you which bits of the film freaked you out the most.

Shimmer is the latest app to overlay media with some metric of quantified self data. Antimap demonstrated the idea with snowboarding, and Nike has incorporated it into its Nike+ Basketball app. Applying biodata-viz incentives to less sporty activities could just be a stroke of genius.

Imagine if sweat charts become the new YouTube reaction video meme?