Face Reader Bridges Autism Gap

By Eric Smalley for Wired News

You are a mind reader, whether you know it or not. You can tell just by looking at a human face whether the person is concentrating, confused,interested or in agreement with you.But people afflicted by autism lack this ability to ascertainemotional status -- it's one of the signature characteristics of the disease. Help could be on the way for autistic individuals, though: A novel computer-vision system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could do the mind reading for those who can't.Two MIT researchers wore tiny cameras mounted on wire rods extending from their chests to demonstrate the Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic, or ESP, at the Body Sensor Networks 2006 international workshop at MIT's Media Lab last week. The video cameras captured facial expressions and head movements, then fed the information to a desktop computer that analyzed the data and gave real-time estimates of the individuals' mental states, in the form of color-coded graphs.
The system's software goes beyond tracking simple emotions like sadness and anger to estimate complex mental states like agreeing, disagreeing, thinking, confused, concentrating and interested. The goal is to put this mental state inference engine on a wearable platform and use it to augment or enhance social interactions, said Rana el Kaliouby, a postdoctoral researcher at the Media Lab.

Full article at: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/1,70655-0.html

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