Two researchers at Vanderbilt University are trying to create a robot that has the ability to sense and respond to human emotions, by processing output from an array of physiological sensors.
"Psychologists have been trying to identify universal patterns of physiological response since the turn of the century without success. All this effort has shown is that there are no such universal patterns," says Smith. "The hard fact is that different individuals express the same emotion rather differently. But I think that we have established the feasibility of the individual-specific approach that we are taking and there is a good chance that we can succeed," says Smith.
The Vanderbilt researchers are using an approach similar to that adopted by voice and handwriting recognition systems. They are gathering baseline information about each person and analyzing it to identify the responses associated with different mental states. One advantage that the researchers have is the recent advances in sensor technology. "Extremely small, 'wearable' sensors have been developed that are quite comfortable and are fast enough for real-time applications," says Sarkar.
