This post could sound like an ad for Exmocare…but it’s not true. Take a look to their pages and you’ll agree with the statement: “Being better connected with -this- (our body signals) 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.”

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.

Emotional information, very simply, can be characterized in two dimensions (see picture).

• Arousal: How excited is the person?
• Valence: How positive is the person?

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.

Why do I blog this?

Let’s start thinking about a group of applications like this, that need to be investigated  deeply: wellness, sensors, a world of opportunities!!