Computers That Feel our Mood

Roland Piquepaille writes "It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the 'reactions' of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you're about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it's difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006."

Comments

Some potential here.

[marcello_dl]

Occurs to me that slashdot crowd sees this as something for a desktop pc. I guess nobody really wants a computer behaving differently depending on our mood. The best coworker, be it a PC or a person, is the one that doesn't let you down, not the one who accurately sees how you feel. 1. Perfection ways to monitor people's mood and, ultimately, thoughts. 2. Use $THREAT_OF_THE_MOMENT to have people getting monitored (sounds difficult? not at all. Just spread some civil disorder and having 911 replying only to calls from people who are monitored to be not lying or joking et voila') 3. no ???? 4. Profit! (as in "better than big brother control of the people")

How about natural speech/text recognition first?

[master_p]

Research into making computers feeling our mood seems to me quite reduntant. Natural speech/text recognition is what researchers should focus on. It would make programming/user interfaces much better.

Best Gadget Ever! Worse than useless.

[twitter]

...If I'm upset because my boss just gave me a 20 minute deadline to finish something, and the computer senses this

Hi, this is your boss and I absolutely love this thing. If you don't like working here, you probably don't belong here. It's been said better, Sometimes the best solution to moral problems is to just fire all of the unhappy people.

Sarcasm off. This technology is sure to be loved and abused as above. Like you, I doubt any real use can be made of the user's emotions and it will get things wrong, even if you do wire everyone up like a space rabbit. Oh yeah, your boss probably knows who Sefert is, even if you only post at home, though other abuses of technology.