You might think that you can fake an emotion with your facial expressions. But what about your heartbeat and breathing rate, your emotion can be guessed by just analyzing your body conditions.
EQ-Radio is a device which is invented by MIT researchers, the idea of building up EQ-Radio was derived from the earlier movement recognition experiment which used wifi signals to detect the movement of individuals or groups in a certain range.
Coming back to EQ-Radio, in simple words a technique of sending wifi signals toward the target and notes down the variations in the wifi signals which was received. Technically the device measures the speed at which data completes a round trip to its target.
here is a video by MIT’s researchers explaining about EQ-Radio
Researchers have claimed that this device is 87% accurate in guessing the emotion of a person by just relying on the data received using the wifi signals.
We all still have one doubt that how they are gonna get the heart rate and breathing rate and analyze them to get an emotion as a result, well the minute variations in the RF waves helps them to extract heart rate and breathing rate of the target.
The video explains in an abstract way how they get to know about emotions from this data. Just in case you were lazy enough to watch the video, the researchers will give this data in their machine learning algorithm which will do the math for you and give the results.
Well, there is one fact which was not explained in the video which is ‘The noise’ well, the noise in any wireless transmission is a big thing to deal with and this is not an exception. Researchers, in this case, were able to measure heart rate with about a 0.3% margin of error which is as good as an ECG monitor.
The device can be used to monitor health and take feedbacks from the viewers of the movie as mentioned in the video.
What more could be said is that this device will be really useful in some of the following cases.
- Far more accurate test screenings and focus groups for ad agencies and film studios
- Smart homes that can adjust lighting and environmental controls to match, or help you out of, your mood
- Smart hotels that could continually customize a guest’s environment according to mood
- Non-invasive healthcare and psychiatric monitoring, with office or home-installed systems
- Directed advertising based on an assessment of a target’s mood
- Interrogations
After reading all this you should also be curious about the dark side of the devices. Every device can be used for good as well as bad. let’s see what possibilities are there for misusing this device.
- This device will just take away our right to privacy.
- It can be used by criminals to know about the health conditions of the target without having to approach the target, and later on, they can do something which can make the targets death natural.
- The device gives the attacker your health record, which is one of the most important data.
there are a lot more dark sides of the device but from a positive side this device will make it easy for normal people to keep track of all the peoples’ emotions in the house, which eventually will let them understand the state of the person, by knowing state of a person you can act according to it. This can definitely give you an idea to not mess with your wife when she is in a bad mood.
references: EQ-Radio Paper