SDF

Visionary : Rosalind Picard

Surprises from a Smartwatch Designed to Sense Emotion

Over fifteen years ago, Rosalind Picard set out to see if she could create the world’s first wearable sensors to measure emotion. As part of this effort, she and her team built a sensor that could measure emotional arousal from your wrist. They watched the sensor data go high with engagement in students’ active problem solving tasks. They also found surprisingly high activation during certain phases of sleep, and showed that these sleep peaks were more helpful in predicting memory consolidation than were EEG readings. While working to measure stress to help children with autism, they discovered that activation deep in the brain, especially during seizures, also maps to patterns that can be read electrically from the surface of the skin on the wrist. These, and other surprising findings have led Picard and the Empatica team to develop a new sensor, Embrace, which will soon be available to the general public to help people better understand their sleep and stress, and to give alerts for seizures. Picard will demonstrate some of the basic wrist-worn sensor capabilities and tell stories about the surprising findings in this talk.