Machine Can Read Your Body Language

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Arhum Ahmad
Mar 22, 2019   •  10 views

Forget Facebook. Your Body emits data that could be used to read your emotions, check your health as well as track aggression.

Even if you opt out of Facebook and all its data-sharing tendencies, avoid using a Smartphone, and generally stay off the internet, you are still emitting data every second of every day. As Poppy Crum, the chief scientist at Dolby Labs demonstrated during a talk at TED Conference in Vancouver, new technologies could soon make it possible for companies and institutions to track your emotions and health using this data.

Crum showed the audience a frightening video. She then offered a data visualization showing the carbon dioxide exhaled by people in the theatre while the video played. Crump had, it turned out, been tracking the audience's carbon dioxide emissions. "You can see where some of us jumped as a deep red cloud it's our collective suspense creating a spike in CO2," she says.

This is the kind of passive data collection technology, according to Crum, that could one day be used to reveal our inner lives to teachers, doctors, and of course, corporations.

Crum, a neurophysiologist by training, does related research. At Dolby, she studies how people watch movies using EEG caps, trackers that measure heart rate and sweat response, and thermal imaging cameras. The idea is to answer a variety of questions that could be used to change the ways films and TV shows are made, including what kinds of scenes cause people to sweat, fall asleep, or get nervous.

Crum believes this kind of technology could eventually be pervasive in our everyday lives. And while some might see it as an invasion of privacy, she thinks it will be used for good if we let it.

"There are so many opportunities right now for a tech to know these things about us, and it's not always bad," she says. In practice, according to her, this could mean allowing healthcare providers access to speech data that could detect diseases (speech changes can be a sign of Alzheimer's, for example) or letting teachers have access to information about how students are reacting lessons.

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