#moodtracking #wearable #technology #MIT #Samsung

Category: Wearable

Industry: New Technologies

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Related to: New Technologies/Wearable/Daily life

Reviewer: Julie Haller – Parsons The New School of Design

Company: Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center

Website: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/mit-made-wearable-knows-conversations-going/

A new kind of wearable just has been developed by researchers of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). In collaboration with the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center, this product, which is an existing Samsung smartwatch, is capable to detect tones in a conversation and tell the wearer if the person he talks to is happy or sad.

After interviewing study participants and making them different kind of tests, the researchers created two algorithms which are capable to analyze and “classify each five-second chunk of conversation as positive, neutral, or negative.”

It is interesting for knowing when your interlocutors were anxious for example in order to analyze conversations and improve it. This is a real progress for people who have anxiety, diseases as autism, or other conditions which makes a talk complicated.

This project was presented last week at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference. Researchers are hoping to improve the technology because currently the level of accuracy is of 83%. The main line of improvement is to recognize more human expressions than “happy” or “sad”, as excited, bored or angry. They also wish to make it compatible with other brands of smartwatch and make it accessible for all the consumers as soon as possible.