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Posted by Julia
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By Lamont Wood, Special to LiveScience
posted: 02 October 2007
source Live Science
They're already predicting, mathematically, what you'll want to watch,
what you'll want to wear, and who you'll want to vote for. Obviously,
the next step is for computers to read your mind—and that's just what
they're working toward at Tufts University in Boston.
Your computer won't be picking up details about your plans for the
evening anytime soon. But researchers with the Human Computer
Interaction group at Tufts have, thanks to a $450,000 grant from the
National Science Foundation, come up with a straightforward way for
your computer to tell if you are overworked, under-worked or
not working at all, according to a paper they will present next week at an Association of Computing Machinery symposium.
That may not sound like penetrating perception, but the researchers
hope that capacity will eventually help them gain real-time insight
into the brain's more subtle emotional states and help provide pointers
about how we can get work done more efficiently.
Futuristic headband
The
mind reading
actually involves measuring the volume and oxygen level of the blood
around the subject's brain, using technology called functional
near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
The user wears a sort of futuristic headband that sends light in that
spectrum into the tissues of the head where it is absorbed by active,
blood-filled tissues. The headband then measures how much light was not
absorbed, letting the computer gauge the
metabolic demands that the brain is making.
The results are often compared to an MRI, but can be gathered with lightweight, non-invasive equipment.
Detecting overwork
Wearing the fNIRS sensor, experimental subjects were asked to count the
number of squares on a rotating onscreen cube and to perform other
tasks. The subjects were then asked to rate the difficulty of the
tasks, and their ratings agreed with the work intensity detected by the
fNIRS system up to 83 percent of the time.
"We don't know how specific we can be about identifying users' different
emotional states,"
cautioned Sergio Fantini, a biomedical engineering professor at Tufts.
"However, the particular area of the brain where the blood-flow change
occurs should provide indications of the brain's metabolic changes and
by extension workload, which could be a proxy for emotions like
frustration."
New evaluation techniques that monitor user experiences while working
with computers are increasingly necessary, because a user may be bored
one moment and overwhelmed the next, said Robert Jacob, a computer
science professor at Tufts who is also involved in the research.
"Measuring mental workload, frustration and distraction is typically
limited to qualitatively observing computer users or to administering
surveys after completion of a task, potentially missing valuable
insight into the users' changing experiences," Jacob said.
HemuZ Technology
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