"Some of our body's responses during a conversation are not designed for broadcast to another person - but it's possible to monitor those too. Your temperature and skin conductance can also reveal secrets about your emotional state, and Picard can tap them with a glove-like device called the Q Sensor. In response to stresses, good or bad, our skin becomes clammy, increasing its conductance, and the Q Sensor picks this up.
Physiological responses can now even be tracked remotely, in principle without your consent. Last year, Picard and one of her graduate students showed that it was possible to measure heart rate without any surface contact with the body. They used software linked to an ordinary webcam to read information about heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature based on, among other things, colour changes in the subject's face (Optics Express, vol 18, p 10762).
It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these sensors could combine to populate the ultimate emotion-reading device. How would the world change if we could all read each other's social signals accurately? Baron-Cohen has already seen the benefits in his studies of people with Asperger's syndrome at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, UK. "It's not a miracle cure," he says, but people equipped with Picard's technology were learning extra social skills. Baron-Cohen says the wearers retained some ability to read emotions accurately after they removed the glasses. Such enhancements for the rest of the population might increase emotional intelligence through the generations."
- via MR (Affectiva website)
Physiological responses can now even be tracked remotely, in principle without your consent. Last year, Picard and one of her graduate students showed that it was possible to measure heart rate without any surface contact with the body. They used software linked to an ordinary webcam to read information about heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature based on, among other things, colour changes in the subject's face (Optics Express, vol 18, p 10762).
It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these sensors could combine to populate the ultimate emotion-reading device. How would the world change if we could all read each other's social signals accurately? Baron-Cohen has already seen the benefits in his studies of people with Asperger's syndrome at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, UK. "It's not a miracle cure," he says, but people equipped with Picard's technology were learning extra social skills. Baron-Cohen says the wearers retained some ability to read emotions accurately after they removed the glasses. Such enhancements for the rest of the population might increase emotional intelligence through the generations."
- via MR (Affectiva website)
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