Cell phones of nowadays are capable of doing a lot of things, but could they be used to monitor our moods? The answer is "yes", according a group of scientists who have developed a system to track people's emotional states through mobile devices.
The mood-analyzing software, called "EmotionSense", was created by psychologists and computer scientists at University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory. Using the recording function commonly found on handsets, EmotionSense gathers excerpts of conversations and compares them with an existing speech library, which is known as the "Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Library". The voice recordings will then be classified into five main emotional categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear and neutral.
After categorization, the researchers will cross-reference these recorded voice clips with other data collected with some built-in phone features, such as the caller's physical location through GPS and the people nearby via Bluetooth technology. Then they will be able to find out how the caller's emotional condition changes according to what time it is, where they are and whom they are with.
To assess the feasibility of the system, the researchers conducted a 10-day test on a group of 18 volunteers. Each given a Nokia 6210 Navigator phone embedded with EmotionSense, they were told to use it as usual and write down their feelings every day. The results showed that EmotionSense corresponded with 70 percent of what participants had written in the diaries, proving the software to be a practicable tool of assessing our state of mind.
The study also gave us insights into factors influencing people's moods. Not surprisingly, participants tended to be happier when they were at home, while being at work normally triggered sad emotions. Besides, they were less expressive when in crowds than alone. Time appeared to affect as well as people were inclined to show more intense emotions in the evening than in the morning.
The mood-detecting technology will need further modification and refinement for more accurate analysis. However, it has already shown how cell phones, which most of us carry around all day for communication, could also be applied to the study of human behavior.
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