'Smart' Houses Of The Future Could Adjust Depending On Your Mood

The house of the future may able to adjust depending on your current mood. Computer scientists and engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology developing a household device that could recognize emotions and mood of the household members.

Nowadays, the things we regularly use every day are being "smartened" up. From internet routers, air conditioning units, door knob, watches, bikes and cars, all of these are being integrated with more features such as internet connectivity. This new wave in technological evolution is called internet of things. But this group of researchers from MIT do not want to dwell on individual appliances. They want to convert an entire house into a "smart house". This is made possible using an EQ-radio which detects the heartbeat and breathing patterns. These patterns are then cross-analyzed using a "beat-extraction algorithm" which analyzes the variations to identify the current mood of a person.

If this device materializes, it could be integrated with other third-party smart devices and send commands to what would be the optimum household condition for the current mood of a person. The researchers claim that the device could detect peoples' emotions with 70 percent accuracy. This method is said to be more accurate that emotion detectors based on facial expressions like in Microsoft's Emotion API.

Co-developer Dina Katabi of the device said as quoted by IFLScience, "Our results could pave the way for future technologies that could help monitor and diagnose conditions like depression and anxiety." Meanwhile co-researcher Fadel Adib the implications of the research could be applied to a more accurate fitness and health monitoring since "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."

The researchers also suggested the probability for medical applications perhaps autonomous adjustment of the room conditions depending on the patient's current condition.