Exmocare creates wearable, multi-sensor devices that use signals from your body to infer things about your emotional state. This may sound unbelievable at first, but it's simpler than you think.
Emotions are often related to physiological effects. The emotional state of a person can often be inferred based on generalizations about this physiological-emotional relationship along with specific information about the individual.
Arousal and Valence
By interpreting an information-rich, individually-tailored physiological context, we can determine the emotional state of a person wearing an Exmocare device.
Emotional information, very simply, can be characterized in two dimensions.
- Arousal: How excited is the person?
- Valence: How positive is the person?
Different emotional states are revealed through patterns of these two dimensions. How? Any emotional state leads to a specific change in our body. We can detect these patterns, and to an even greater extent, differentiate between them.
For example, it has been scientifically proven that, often, your heart rate will rise as you become angry. So, when an Exmocare device sees a rising heart rate, one possible reason is that you are, in fact, angry. Of course, there are many possible reasons. The unique power of Exmocare devices is that by recognizing context they can make better and better guesses.
For example...
Imagine David is a 65-year-old male wearing his Exmocare watch for the first time while driving his car. His heart rate makes a curve like the one to the left.
We can, from information about other 65-year-old males driving cars, make some assumptions about what he's feeling.
The tenth time David wears his watch, we can make better assumptions because at this point we know that much more about David's normal physiological state.
In other words, we can now analyze his current state against a baseline state for David as an individual.
From here, we can look at the change in his skin temperature, his skin conductance, and how fast he's driving, how much he's moving, and so on.
With all this data, we have a much clearer picture of how David is feeling.
This may all seem academic. You may ask, as we did, "how do we use it to make our lives better?" We believe that the first step to being happier and healthier is for you (or your loved ones, if you choose) to know when, why, and how you are feeling your best and your worst.
Being better connected with this information about ourselves and our loved ones provides the first step toward the great promise of technology that works for us - not just to make us more productive, but to improve the way we live.