A team of researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea are working on smart phones capable of inferring user emotion. As reported in MIT’s Technology Review:
Rather than relying on specialized sensors or cameras, the phone infers a user’s emotional state based on how he’s using the phone.
For example, it monitors certain inputs, such as the speed at which a user types, how often the “backspace” or “special symbol” buttons are pressed, and how much the device shakes. These measures let the phone postulate whether the user is happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, or disgusted, says Hosub Lee, a researcher with Samsung Electronics and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology’s Intelligence Group, in South Korea. Lee led the work on the new system. He says that such inputs may seem to have little to do with emotions, but there are subtle correlations between these behaviors and one’s mental state, which the software’s machine-learning algorithms can detect with an accuracy of 67.5 percent.
The system could trigger different ringtones on a phone to convey the caller’s emotional state or cheer up someone who’s feeling low. “The smart phone might show a funny cartoon to make the user feel better,” he says.
Just last week I blogged about a phone app that allows you to treat your phobias at home, without the expense of a visit to the psychiatrist, now we have phones that are treating our emotional state. The question remains- Is technology going to put our mental health care workers out of business? Will we someday look fondly back on the days when we would go into an office and be told to lie down on a couch and actually share our troubles with a real, live human? I hope not…
[...] blogged about smart phones being capable of inferring user emotion. Then there were the apps that help you to work through your phobias. Here is yet another [...]