Mood-sensing smartphone tells your shrink how you feel

[Nipuna]

Mood-tracker needed (Image: Plainpicture)

mg21729056.600-1_300[1].jpg (7.77 KiB) Viewed 6002 times

PEOPLE with anxiety, depression or stress are often asked to record their mood changes throughout the day, helping psychologists fine-tune their treatment. But they often forget, recording only sparse information at best. Now an emotion-sensing smartphone app that automatically generates someone's "mood diary" could give psychologists all the data they need.

It's the brainchild of Matt Dobson and Duncan Barclay, founders of speech recognition firm EI Technologies, based in Saffron Walden, UK. Instead of relying on people writing diaries, the app, called Xpression, listens for telltale changes in a person's voice that indicate whether they are in one of five emotional states: calm, happy, sad, angry or anxious/frightened. It then lists a person's moods against the times they change, and automatically emails the list to their psychologist at the end of the day.

To work, the app has to be always on, listening out for the user's voice once every second, whether they are talking to family, friends, colleagues or even pets. It also listens in on phone calls. If the user is silent, the app does nothing. Crucially for the users' privacy, it doesn't record their words, instead seeking out telltale acoustic features – like pitch – that are indicative of emotional state.

This kind of emotion recognition via voice pattern already works well and is a "hot area" of research, says Stephen Cox, head of the speech processing lab at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who is scientific adviser for the firm.

Initially, Xpression will send 200-millisecond-long acoustic snapshots to a remote server where a machine-learning system will work out a person's emotional state before sending it back to the app for storage. Factors like voice loudness, intensity, changes in pitch and speaking pace allow the system to accurately estimate somebody's emotional state. "We extract acoustic features and let the machine-learning system work it out," says Cox. This ability will be built into the app itself eventually, says Dobson.

There's a strong need for this kind of technology, says Adrian Skinner, a clinical psychologist with the UK's National Health Service in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. "With conditions like depression, people tend to stop doing things like filling in mood diaries. If this app gives us more complete diaries it could help us better find the day-to-day triggers that raise or lower a patient's mood," he says.

The firm is a finalist in a UK government competition to identify the nation's top mobile tech company, to be judged on 26 February. An insurance company has already expressed an interest in using the app to ensure the workplace stress therapy it pays for is effective. Clinical trials are due to take place later this year.

This article appeared in print under the headline "We know how you really feel"

[SemiconductorCat]

I'm sorry I can't agree with this.

>> In the modern times, cell phones have become an essential part of our life. You will be out of fashion if you have no cell phone.

simply I'm fat , ugly , dark skinned and out of shape so I'm out of fashion anyway. I'm using a i35 android phone
because of it's necessitate to me. I could not even imagine a life without that device. Because my whole life is
in that device. I normally don't do chat in my computer because technologically it's a waste to keep a x86_64 processor
on 24 hours [because of it's higher power consumption]. I do on my laptop computer when I'm learning and doing
programming. Life if somebody told "Life in C/C++ is possible without pre-processor , It's something that I could not
believe".

And also it's true that some people do use mobil phone as a fashion. Yes super rich girls. There are specially build
cell phones for them. Such as pink colored. A phone like a rose. Need to tell this also a industry. Anyway these devices
are very expensive and a normal internet user could not archive those devices. When a normal user think about a cell
phone's outfit is how much soft and portable it is to your hand. So sometimes the portability to hard use. Use in
bus.

>> teacher, lecture, or boss.

Again these are also the traditional concepts. One of a dam reason why our community does not go forward in technology
is this. When I took out my phone in a lecture , the lecture get nervous. Because he thinks that he is very important
than anything else. It's actually a psychological disability. Sad to say it's so common among our community and
University lectures. If somebody could use his cell phone without disturbing the lecture which ongoing silently,then it's
not a problem at all. Why do he need to care about ? Everybody have their own personal life.

>> jammer.
Yes jammer is a useful device and no doubt about it. But it's usefulness or mis-usefulness will depend top on how it's
going to use. For a lecture hall, it's useless. But for a exam hall it's useful.

>> privacy and private life.
This is a technological concern more than a law policy or social problem. This is a true technological problem.
Most android devices do support 'Download mode'. These kind of mode could be easily obtained by anybody
who stolen the phone. Simply today's phones are easily probed into it's download mode just by pressing some
key combinations.What the hell, then you have root access on all the phone's information. Because my whole the
internet life is inside my phone. Even I use to check facebook when I was a bus with my phone. I do use to read
news when I was riding at the bus. Every passwords [google sync account] is inside the phone. This is a huge
problem.

Even there is a difficulty to implement password and encryption protection on ROM code programs.
Refer to the ARM bootup sequence for more detail.

[renaebaldini]

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