As far as I know, I don't have autism, but I still want one of these devices. Too often I feel like I need such a magic device, especially when talking on the telephone.
The Social-Cue Reader People with autism tend to have difficulty understanding other people’s emotional states, which can turn even casual conversation into a minefield of missed emotional cues and inadvertent faux pas. But last spring, two computer scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab unveiled a new device that promises to help people with autism perform the kind of everyday “mind reading” others take for granted.The Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis, developed by Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard, consists of a small camera mounted on a cap or glasses that monitors a conversation partner’s facial expressions and feeds the data into a hand-held computer. Software tracks the movement of facial features and classifies them using a coding system developed by the psychologist Paul Ekman, which is then correlated with a second taxonomy of emotional states created by the Cambridge autism researcher (and Ali G cousin) Simon Baron-Cohen. Almost instantaneously, the computer crunches each raised eyebrow and pucker of the lips, giving a whispered verdict about how the person is feeling.
Maybe not autism, but asperger syndrome?
Tags: neuroscience, /Technology
