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Device Developed To Help Socially Challenged
An anonymous reader writes "A device from MIT Media Labs that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed." From the article: "The 'emotional social intelligence prosthetic' device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate."
According to TFA, autistic people cannot discern or interpret a bored look on someone's face, but can realize that feeling a vibration in their hand means that someone is bored. Using a camera (to detect boredom) means that the autistic person is looking at the person he is speaking to. It's interesting that a human could receive image data and be unable to remember what it means, but receive touch data and be able to remember its meaning. If this interaction is correct, then a big high five to the geniuses that found the vibration communication channel into autistic minds. Of course if this is not the case, how will a vibrator help? This sounds like an unlikely solution to me, but I have not studied autism. Perhaps, the importance of this study is not that it will actually help autistic people, but that our face recognition capabilities are getting to the point of being useable in today's society. -C
I'd like to see some statistics on the accuracy of this device.
Sounds like a horrible idea, the subject matter is so incredibly subjective, and human emotions are so incredibly fickle, laced with an infinite and exponential number of variables that determine what anything 'means' from someone, to someone else.
Plus, does this help the autistic person learn more about people, or make them more dependent upon a machine?
In my mind, something like this only worsens autism because it prevents the individual from having to 'learn how to understand alien stimuli' by interpreting it for them.
I use to baby sit / care for one of my friends little brother, he was diagnosed with severe autism at an early age. Watching him grow older, in my eyes, he learned how to understand new things on his own (just sometimes it took a little longer than it does for most kids his age), like how the rest of us learn things (cause & effect / trial and error) it's not impossible for autistic individuals to perceive and comprehend this kind of stimuli, they just receive it on a different wavelength than we do, and in turn process it in a different manner.
A device like this isn't going to 'teach' anyone anything, it's simply a crutch that IMHO, will stifle development and learning.
As a side note, to me autism is a type of genius, that we just don't know how to comprehend as a society, this kid could do some of the most AMAZING things with number letter combinations / geometrical shapes I've ever seen.
It's interesting that a human could receive image data and be unable to remember what it means, but receive touch data and be able to remember its meaning.
The issue isn't memory, its recognition. Those suffering from autism may not be able to connect to the people around them on a more emotional level, however vibration like from a ringtone is a que to stop doing whatever it is you are doing. It makes perfect sense that someone could not recognize the emotional state of another, but could easily recognize the vibration of a mobile device.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.