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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
- Crow T. Trollbot
Hopefully I can get one for my boss
So we have special key words we use so he knows when I am becoming bored or angry.
He will say something like
"We need to achieve synergy across our departmental endeavour so we can proactively engage any challenges the business may face"
I will then respond
"You are a fucking wanker"
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"I see you are talking to someone who is trying to be friendly. What would you like to do now?
* gently brush the person off?
* actively engage the person
* seduce the person?"
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Experts claim the "Microcomputer" will enable sufferers to hold down meaningful jobs while avoiding painful human interaction.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
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 might be nice to know when I am losing someone's interest, but, as an Aspie, I really don't have much to say to NT's anyway. I mean if I could hold conversations that interest a NT I wouldn't need the device in the first place. The reality, however, is that conversations that seem to intrigue NT's hold no interest for me. And for some reason I do not get, NT's do not like to talk about the same couple of topics incessantly. I have learned to do the obligatory greetings, but they are best kept short. Anything else is either about business, which has a finite set of interactions (I am fine within my knowledge base), or involves friends that have similar interests. I know some aspies want better communications with the NT world, but knowing when the person is bored would, at least for me, be worse because I still wouldn't know what words to speak to make it better. I guess in the long run maybe, after performing some statistical analysis concerning what words make a person bored. But then again, I pretty much already know that people do not want to talk about scifi or computers or world domination, so it is back to square one.
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