As soon as it鈥檚 on my head, Google Glass picks up my pulse. Late for the meeting, I had scrambled up to the third floor of the MIT Media Lab for this demo, and my racing heart shows it. I huff and puff while , the project鈥檚 leader, explains how it works. As he talks, my heart beat settles down before my eyes: 79 beats per minute, 73, 69.
Hernandez has taught Glass to measure vital signs like pulse and respiration using just the headset鈥檚 built-in gyroscope, accelerometer and camera. They pick up the subtle head motion caused by the beating of the heart, and tease out the rise and fall of a breath from other movements.
Together with other data captured by Glass, Hernandez鈥檚 algorithms aim to give the wearer a window into their emotional state. It鈥檚 of a new system, called SenseGlass, that is designed to make us more aware of 鈥� and to better control 鈥� our mental well-being.
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A good listener
The work represents a big leap forward in the field of affective computing, which seeks to build technologies that measure, respond to, and influence our emotions. Rosalind Picard, who is working with Hernandez on the project, says Google Glass could be a powerful tool for making computers more emotionally attuned.
鈥淚t鈥檚 always been a challenge to have a computer understand something about your stress but not make it worse in the moment,鈥� says Picard. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been hard to get it right because we haven鈥檛 been able to monitor it in real time in a comfortable way until now. What鈥檚 really groundbreaking is that my ordinary eyeglasses could have that capability.鈥�
Powerful as it is to see one鈥檚 heart rate floating before you, biological data is not enough to infer emotion 鈥� context is also vital. For that, the researchers use Glass鈥檚 camera to record what the wearer is seeing. They can then analyse the data by either comparing it with biological information, or using apps the team is developing, such as , built by Niaja Farve, also at MIT, which counts the number of smiles the wearer receives during the day.
Other apps exist that can use Google Glass to measure a wearer鈥檚 emotion. The start-up firm wants to use Glass to let retailers measure your feelings, while researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany an app called Shore which identifies the emotions on the faces of people around you.
Feeling better
SenseGlass is different, says Hernandez, in that the team鈥檚 goal is to help users take an active role in modulating their own emotions. 鈥淪ay you want to avoid depression,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou might want to find when you have low variation in your heart rate in response to a stimulus, or something like that, and then take pictures and show them to you. It鈥檚 about helping you to reflect on your daily life in a meaningful way.鈥�
鈥淔olks with autism often have difficulty with emotion,鈥� says of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who co-authored a paper on the system that will be presented at the conference in Athens, Greece in November. 鈥淥ne idea is that tech like this might be used to let a care provider better understand what is going on with the person they鈥檙e caring for.鈥�
鈥淲hat they鈥檙e putting together has the potential to address all the challenges that come with real world emotional monitoring,鈥� says , who directs the wearable healthcare program at Imec, a medical equipment company in San Francisco. 鈥淚n a single platform they managed to get context and physiological data, and not only to sense but also to deliver feedback. That鈥檚 very unique.鈥�
