As many a relationship book can tell you, understanding someone else’s emotions can be a difficult task. Facial expressions aren’t always reliable: A smile can conceal frustration, while a poker face might mask a winning hand.
But what if technology could tell us how someone is really feeling?
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed “EQ-Radio,” a device that can detect a person’s emotions using wireless signals.
By measuring subtle changes in breathing and heart rhythms, EQ-Radio is 87 percent accurate at detecting if a person is excited, happy, angry or sad — and can do so without on-body sensors.
MIT professor and project lead Dina Katabi envisions the system being used in entertainment, consumer behavior, and health care. Film studios and ad agencies could test viewers’ reactions in real-time, while smart homes could use information about your mood to adjust the heating or suggest that you get some fresh air.
“Our work shows that wireless signals can capture information about human behavior that is not always visible to the naked eye,” says Katabi, who co-wrote a paper on the topic with PhD students Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib. “We believe that our results could pave the way for future technologies that could help monitor and diagnose conditions like depression and anxiety.”
EQ-Radio builds on Katabi’s continued efforts to use wireless technology for measuring human behaviors such as breathing and falling. She says that she will incorporate emotion-detection into her spinoff company Emerald, which makes a device that is aimed at detecting and predicting falls among the elderly.
Using wireless signals reflected off people’s bodies, the device measures heartbeats as accurately as an ECG monitor, with a margin of error of approximately 0.3 percent. It then studies the waveforms within each heartbeat to match a person’s behavior to how they previously acted in one of the four emotion-states.
Full Story is available from MIT website.
But what if technology could tell us how someone is really feeling?
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed “EQ-Radio,” a device that can detect a person’s emotions using wireless signals.
By measuring subtle changes in breathing and heart rhythms, EQ-Radio is 87 percent accurate at detecting if a person is excited, happy, angry or sad — and can do so without on-body sensors.
MIT professor and project lead Dina Katabi envisions the system being used in entertainment, consumer behavior, and health care. Film studios and ad agencies could test viewers’ reactions in real-time, while smart homes could use information about your mood to adjust the heating or suggest that you get some fresh air.
“Our work shows that wireless signals can capture information about human behavior that is not always visible to the naked eye,” says Katabi, who co-wrote a paper on the topic with PhD students Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib. “We believe that our results could pave the way for future technologies that could help monitor and diagnose conditions like depression and anxiety.”
EQ-Radio builds on Katabi’s continued efforts to use wireless technology for measuring human behaviors such as breathing and falling. She says that she will incorporate emotion-detection into her spinoff company Emerald, which makes a device that is aimed at detecting and predicting falls among the elderly.
Using wireless signals reflected off people’s bodies, the device measures heartbeats as accurately as an ECG monitor, with a margin of error of approximately 0.3 percent. It then studies the waveforms within each heartbeat to match a person’s behavior to how they previously acted in one of the four emotion-states.
Full Story is available from MIT website.
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