A prosthesis for emotions

The device that recognizes man’s emotions will save the autists from loneliness with the inability to capture hidden reactions and social signals - one of the main problems of patients suffering from autism. Others begin to shun them, and autists turn out to be outcasts, which is why they suffer a lot. To help such people to perceive the reaction of others is called up by an “emotional social prosthesis” that identifies human emotions.

The device, which was designed by the wound of El Kaliubi and its colleagues from the Massachusetts Technological Institute, consists of a small chamber that is attached to points and a portable computer connected to it. The latter is equipped with software that allows you to analyze the image coming through the camera and compare it with samples laid in the database. This, in fact, is the whole process of recognizing emotions. If the image has signs characteristic of a person manifesting negative reactions, the device sends an autistic a certain signal.

Back in 2004, El Kaliubi demonstrated that she created in collaboration with Peter Robinson from Cambridge University, the software recognizes such conditions of a person as consent, disagreement, concentration, reflection, uncertainty or disadvantage. As the New Scientist magazine notes, this was a big step forward, since the previous programs could distinguish only six basic emotional states: fun, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust, and in its pure form such emotions are quite rare. The El Kaliubi program was tested at dozens of video clips lasting eight seconds each in which the actors expressed this or that emotion. The system remembered the movement of eyebrows, lips, nose, fixed the inclinations and nods of the head and, based on the algorithm laid in it, made its conclusions. During these tests, the program correctly determined the state of the actor in 90% of cases. When testing video recordings of ordinary people, the result was worse - 64%. Now El Kaliubi is “training” the software on excerpts from films and rollers recorded by a webcam.

Work on the device itself also continues. The problem is that the effectiveness of the recognition system directly depends on the power of the computer, and in traditional PDA it is not so great. In addition, it is necessary to create a camera with high resolution, which will be conveniently worn on glasses (it should be attached to the arc). And, finally, a certain difficulty lies in the autists themselves, who should somehow be taught to look into the eyes of the interlocutor during a conversation - otherwise the camera will not be able to track the manifestations of emotions.

04/05/2006 / Oleg Komotsky material published in the newspaper No. 59 dated 06.04.2006.