Wearable reduces anxiety, improves communication for those with Asperger’s

Individuals with anxiety or social disorders such as Asperger syndrome experience difficulties communicating with others. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) have developed a wearable device capable of predicting if conversations are happy, sad or neutral to improve communication.

"Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious," said graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with Mohammad Ghassemi. "Our work is a step in this direction, suggesting that we may not be that far away from a world where people can have an AI social coach right in their pocket."

Wearing Samsung Simbands, participants had 31 different conversations, each several minutes long, to train two algorithms. One classified the overall conversation as happy or sad, and the other used five seconds of the conversations to determine a positive, negative or neutral measurement. The wearables also used high-resolution physiological waveforms to measure movement, heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow and skin temperature.

"As far as we know, this is the first experiment that collects both physical data and speech data in a passive but robust way, even while subjects are having natural, unstructured interactions," said Ghassemi. "Our results show that it's possible to classify the emotional tone of conversations in real-time."

"Our next step is to improve the algorithm's emotional granularity so that it is more accurate at calling out boring, tense, and excited moments, rather than just labeling interactions as 'positive' or 'negative,'" said Alhanai. "Developing technology that can take the pulse of human emotions has the potential to dramatically improve how we communicate with each other."