Wireless signals can detect your feelings with new device

Researchers claim that EQ-Radio is 87 percent accurate at detecting whether a person is excited, happy, angry or sad.

Using wireless signals reflected off people’s bodies, the device measures heartbeats as accurately as an ECG monitor, with a margin of error of approximately 0.3 percent.

Applications in health care seem almost boundless; the research team suggest it could be used to help with monitoring and diagnosing conditions that have strong emotional components, including depression and anxiety.

The team will present the work next month at the Association of Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom). It’s roughly as accurate at measuring heartbeat time as a traditional electrocardiogram, say the MIT scientists, who are also working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital to study potential medical applications.

Researchers are working on a new device that can detect a person’s emotions using wireless signals reflecting off a person’s body. They were listening to music, looking at photos, or watching videos to help them recall memories that made them feel either happy, excited, sad, angry, or neutral. It analyzes waveforms from within each heartbeat to match a person’s behavior to how they acted previously in one of the four emotional states (joy, anger, excitement, sadness). When the signals show low arousal and negative affect, the device registers the emotion as sad.

“This work demonstrates that wireless technologies can capture meaningful information about human behavior that is invisible to the naked eye”, Zhao says. At the same time, the technology mitigates the impact of breathing in order to emphasize the signals from the heartbeats. Its beat-extraction algorithms break the reflections into individual heartbeats and analyze the small variations in heartbeat intervals to determine their levels of arousal and positive affect.

Researchers also found that heart rates, rather than breathing rates, were the bigger indicator of a person’s emotional state (after all, you can mask your breathing, but your heart is harder to control).

To test the technology, the team recruited 12 subjects, including actors, who used videos or music they personally selected, meant to evoke one or another of the emotions for them, as well as a fifth video that enabled the researchers to collect a “no-emotion” baseline.

While EQ-Radio’s detection capabilities vary from person to person, the device can detect emotions with 70% accuracy on the first try with a new person, the researchers said. To make sure they don’t get confused, the wireless signals are based on acceleration instead of distance traveled by the chest (rise and fall). In the future, machines could monitor and diagnose depression and anxiety.

“By recovering measurements of the heart valves actually opening and closing at a millisecond time-scale, this system can literally detect if someone’s heart skips a beat”, Fadel Adib, another team member explained.