Mood-Predicting Wearables - 'Social Coach' for People with Anxiety or Asperger's

A single conversation can be interpreted in many different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions such as Asperger's, this can make social situations very stressful. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) introduce an artificially intelligent, wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad, or neutral based on a person's speech patterns and vitals. As a participant tells a story, the system can analyze audio, text transcriptions, and physiological signals to determine the overall tone of the story with 83 percent accuracy. The MIT CSAIL researchers had subjects wear a Samsung Simband, a research device that captures high-resolution physiological waveforms. After capturing 31 different conversations of several minutes each, the team trained two algorithms on the data: One classified the overall nature of a conversation as either happy or sad, while the second classified each five-second block of every conversation as positive, negative, or neutral.

Transcript

00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] And so when I went and showed up, I showed up actually in the wrong lobby. And I was waiting in it for 20 minutes, thinking, where is everybody? Why is nobody here? And then I get this frantic text from one of the people saying, oh, my god, where are you? We're about to shoot the video.

00:00:22 And I started school and I remember the first day, I was so excited. I got my notebook out and my pencil bag, and I had it on the table. Because I thought I was going to learn to read and write that first day. So I was just ready. And then the whole day went by and it was just introductions and stuff like that. And I was kind of sad that it ended like that.

00:00:40 Because I thought I was going to learn to read and write the first day. So your expectation was just like, that's it, you're going to be an adult, you can do all these cool tricks. Yeah, I'm going to go to school and I'm going to learn to read and write. And I was just so excited. [MUSIC PLAYING]