facegraph.jpg

This post could sound like an ad for Exmocare…but it’s not true. Take a look to their pages and you’ll agree with the state­ment: “Being bet­ter con­nected with –this– (our body sig­nals) infor­ma­tion about our­selves and our loved ones pro­vides the first step toward the great promise of tech­nol­ogy that works for us — not just to make us more pro­duc­tive, but to improve the way we live.”

Exmo­care cre­ates wear­able, multi-​sensor devices that use sig­nals from your body to infer things about your emo­tional state. This may sound unbe­liev­able at first, but it’s sim­pler than you think. Emo­tions are often related to phys­i­o­log­i­cal effects. The emo­tional state of a per­son can often be inferred based on gen­er­al­iza­tions about this physiological-​emotional rela­tion­ship along with spe­cific infor­ma­tion about the individual.

Emo­tional infor­ma­tion, very sim­ply, can be char­ac­ter­ized in two dimen­sions (see picture).

  • Arousal: How excited is the person?
  • Valence: How pos­i­tive is the person?

For exam­ple, it has been sci­en­tif­i­cally proven that, often, your heart rate will rise as you become angry. So, when an Exmo­care device sees a ris­ing heart rate, one pos­si­ble rea­son is that you are, in fact, angry. Of course, there are many pos­si­ble rea­sons. The unique power of Exmo­care devices is that by rec­og­niz­ing con­text they can make bet­ter and bet­ter guesses.

Why do I blog this?

Let’s start think­ing about a group of appli­ca­tions like this, that need to be inves­ti­gated  deeply: well­ness, sen­sors, a world of opportunities!!

Related posts:

  1. Tech­nol­ogy is there
  2. Online Iden­tity. How Many Infor­ma­tion Is Out There?
  3. Change your Mind
  4. What If Thieves Were Social Too?
  5. GPS Reloaded