What will happen when machines can tell how you feel?

WHEN Rosalind Picard announced to the world that

computers needed to understand emotion, many scoffed. But her book, Affective Computing, published 20 years ago, seeded a new field. It’s now clear that computers will serve us better if we can help them understand what matters to us – using changes in our physiology, movement, facial expression and tone of voice to discern our emotions.

Affective computing is enjoying quite a few real-world applications. What kinds of ideas are you working on at the moment?

Something I’m excited about are wearable systems that help people see their stress levels and mood changing. In the early days of affective computing, a “wearable” computer might have weighed 50 pounds – totally impractical. Today, I’ve got this lightweight device on my wrist, the Empatica Embrace. Its sensors record my skin conductance, motion data and skin-surface temperature 24/7 – information linked to my mood, stress and activity levels. It’s connected to a smartphone app. Using our latest tech, this set-up is around 85 per cent accurate at predicting a person’s mood, stress and health tomorrow night based on their data from today.

What’s the appeal of this system?

People have huge differences in their ability to gauge their own emotions and how those feelings change over time. People with autism in particular have difficulty with this but it is by no means limited to them. I’ve had computer scientists pull me aside, usually privately, and say “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘feelings’.” It can be a terrible handicap that affects women as well as men.

So we have an opportunity to help people learn more about their feelings. Turning on cameras to see how much someone smiles and frowns, and listening for the emotion in their speech could also be beneficial. Personally, I’ve learned a lot about my stress using the wrist sensor – about what activates it, what calms me down.

How might this sort of technology help us deal with stress?

In the heat of the moment, you don’t want your phone to act like the HAL 9000 computer in the movie 2001 – “Hey Dave, take a stress pill.” But imagine that you’re someone who isn’t aware of stress until it suddenly becomes overwhelming – that’s true for lots of people – and that you have a wearable device that gently warns you well before the stress level gets high, giving you the chance to change what you’re doing. What I’m working on is raising a person’s awareness of subtle changes before they would naturally become aware of them, and certainly before a looming emotional storm hits that affects them and everybody around them.

Source https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531350-200-what-will-happen-when-machines-can-tell-how-you-feel/