In a recently unearthed research paper written from Microsoft Research, the company has been looking into smartphones that can detect your mood. The technology, known as “MoodScope, would allow users to automatically share these moods through social networks like Facebook. According to the report, Microsoft’s prototype can detect your mood at 66% accuracy on average. Microsoft believes its MoodScope could let other people know how you’re feeling before they speak with you, and help serve up the type of video and music content that’s appropriate to the user’s mood.
We report a first-of-its-kind smartphone software system, MoodScope, which infers the mood of its user based on how the smartphone is used. Compared to smartphone sensors that measure acceleration, light, and other physical properties, MoodScope is a “sensor” that measures the mental state of the user and provides mood as an important input to context-aware computing. We run a formative statistical mood study with smartphone-logged data collected from 32 participants over two months. Through the study, we find that by analyzing communication history and application usage patterns, we can statistically infer a user’s daily mood average with an initial accuracy of 66%, which gradually improves to an accuracy of 93% after a two-month personalized training period. Motivated by these results, we build a service, MoodScope, which analyzes usage history to act as a sensor of the user’s mood. We provide a MoodScope API for developers to use our system to create mood-enabled applications. We further create and deploy a mood-sharing social application.
I can’t decide if this is cool or creepy as hell! What do you think?
[Via: Microsoft Research]