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Microsoft Research Adds 'Mood Detection' To Smartphones
angry tapir writes "Researchers at Microsoft Research have produced a prototype software system that can be used on smartphones to infer a user's mood. The 'MoodScope' system produced by researchers uses smartphone usage patterns to determine whether someone is happy, calm, excited, bored or stressed and could potentially add a new dimension to to mobile apps (as well as, as the researchers note, open up a Pandora's Box of privacy issues). The researchers created a low-power background service for iPhones and Android handsets that (with training) can offer reasonable detection of mood and offers and API that app developers could hook into."
When I'm sad will I suddenly see lots of adds for antidepressant?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Whenever I approach society, particularly women, I'm very quickly enlightened about my emotional state : ) I don't think hearing it again from my phone would add any useful data to that stack of baggage. One thing that would be extremely cool would be a sensor for smell, I was born completely without this so I'd love to know if I smell bad, gas is leaking, burning and so on. I never actually even knew smell existed until I was in my teens, it took another year or so after that for me to believe people weren't just faking it.
They don't make a version for their own phone OS?
Because hardly anyone buys phones with their phone OS. True story... not a troll:
I have a friend who has been anti-smartphone for years. She absolutely refused to buy a smartphone because she knew she'd end up playing with it all the time. Every time her cheap "dumb" phone died, she'd go get another cheap dumb phone. A couple months ago she told me she got a Lumia. I was shocked. She said she only got it because the salesperson was offering it for free because they weren't selling. That and he said it was so bad she figured she wouldn't get sucked into playing with it. Her review after a few weeks: "It's pretty, but I hate using it. Which is exactly what I wanted." Reminds me of Domino in Thunderball (the novel), telling the tobacconist she wants a carton of cigarettes that is so terrible it will make her stop smoking.
I'm not saying no one uses Windows phones. There are people who have them specifically because they hate them and they were free.