Device Alerts You if You're Boring

Wearable computing is helping the boring and and irrating by giving the wearer cues when the person they're talking to is loosing interest or getting annoyed. Most people don't really need devices like this, but for those with autism have an inability to pick up on social cues that are natural to the rest of us.

The "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate.

Now it would be great to have something like this that was designed to do the opposite, give information to the wearer when they're being interesting. Instead of getting negative signals, they would get positive signals. This stuff is very similar to lie detection with facial recognition. Expect the robots / cyborgs / big brother to be very hip to what you're up to in that near near future.

[ Link via Google News ]