Posted on 09/20/2016 10:33:37 AM PDT by BenLurkin
"The whole thing started by trying to understand how we can extract information about people’s emotions and health in general using something that’s completely passive—does not require people to wear anything on their body or have to express things themselves actively," says Prof. Dina Katabi, who conducted the research along with graduate students Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib.
The system, called EQ-Radio, works by generating a low-power wireless signal and measuring the time it takes the signal to reflect from various signals in its vicinity. Since the reflection time from people’s bodies vary as they inhale and exhale, and as their hearts beat, it can distinguish humans from other objects that generate static reflections, according to a paper the team plans to present next month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.
Then, the system learns to distinguish heartbeats, which cause faster but smaller changes in reflections, from breathing, which leads to slower but larger differences.
...
"We are able to extract breathing and heart rate in a very passive way without asking the user to do anything except for what he does naturally," says Katabi, who in 2013 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for her work on wireless networks.
Both sets of measurements are then fed into a machine-learning process that observes people in emotional states including anger, joy, and sadness, along with their heart and breathing rates. Once it’s trained, EQ-Radio is about 87% accurate in recognizing emotions in people it observed during training and more than 70% accurate in others, the researchers say.
(Excerpt) Read more at fastcompany.com ...
From 1984:
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as
to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face
expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your
heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
bump
I always get a sense of the general emotional state of a city by looking for a river of slime in the subway.
I remember that passage now that you cite it.
Very clever quick wit FRiends here.
Who knew that 1984 would become a prescient governance instruction manual?
We’ll have to figure out a way to stay in touch during upcoming Hunger Games times ahead.
Ham radio?
Breaker, breaker, this is Winston Smith 8, does anyone copy? ;n)
RE: “From 1984:
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as
to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face
expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your
heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.”
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