14 DAY TRIAL // In the television show “Lie to Mie” character doctor Cal Ligthman is presented to the viewers as an expert at reading micro expressions.
Micro expression is a term coined to define a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans according to emotions experienced. And research into the field has showed there are six fundamental emotions can be distinguished in all human beings: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.
But reaching the capabilities of Doctor Cal Lightman would require an immense amount of studying and practice, not to mention personal intuition. But couldn’t technology play a part in the scheme of figuring out what a person is actually feeling? And if it does, at what cost?
The answer is, of course it can. Dell for example is taking an alternative route and is not looking to the subject’s face to figure out what he or she might be feeling.
The company is experimenting with brain and body sensors that are to be used to detect a person’s mood. Dell aims to implement the technology in future computers / mobile devices involved in education and communications.
The system would also be able to pick up emotions while driving or playing games. Dell’s research team is currently working on a prototype that is able to combine heart rate, pulse and other body functions in the hopes of being able to pick up whether the person is happy, sad, anxious, fearful and so on.
Such mood detecting mechanisms would be able to aid teacher of the future known when the students are most alert and ready to learn or could help managers communicate more effectively with their workers.
But what about the privacy of emotion? The implementation of such technology has the potential of becoming a really touchy subject.
What if you’re an employee affected by a personal disappointment, would you like your boss to know about it? How would such a technology be capable of recognizing which emotions are appropriate to be relayed on to your employee and which aren’t? I think we’re stepping into the realm of artificial intelligence here.
Like every other invention like this, feeling detecting technology is double bladed. We could also imagine an alternate scenario, like somebody being in the car on the phone with a friend and suddenly fear is sensed.
Dell is not the only one tackling the possibility of building tech that can read emotions. Sentiment Analysis is an app prototype for the Google Glass that should be able to read the emotional state and overall sentiment the person is experiencing.
The app is said to have a real-life applicability in retail, prompting advertisers to go right on target with the products they are tempting you with. Feeling jolly and hopeful? Here, we have a very luxurious trip itinerary for you to look into.
But that certainly makes us uneasy, imagining product advertising becoming so accurate, we won’t be able to say no when being offered whatever our mood indicates we should be offered.
So the bottom question is, as useful as it would be to have all our emotions put on display on a silver plate, how many of us would enjoy having our minds being probed constantly?
Would that prompt us to become better citizens of society or turn us into Tibetan monks struggling to keep our minds devoid of everything, for fear of being outed to the world?
I can certainly see an applicability of these feeling-reading systems in prison environments, for example, where it would be helpful to know if some inmates are planning a riot, due to being unhappy about some new regulations. But in real life, wouldn’t knowing everything about everyone, actually cancel out freedom?