Computer to Read Minds Lamont Wood
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Tue Oct 2, 9:05 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/computertoreadminds

They're already predicting, mathematically, what you'll want to
watch, what you'll want to wear, and who you'll want to vote for.
Obviously, the next step is for computers to read your mind—and
that's just what they're working toward at Tufts University in Boston.

Your computer won't be picking up details about your plans for the
evening anytime soon. But researchers with the Human Computer
Interaction group at Tufts have, thanks to a $450,000 grant from the
National Science Foundation, come up with a straightforward way for
your computer to tell if you are overworked, under-worked or not
working at all, according to a paper they will present next week at
an Association of Computing Machinery symposium.

That may not sound like penetrating perception, but the researchers
hope that capacity will eventually help them gain real-time insight
into the brain's more subtle emotional states and help provide
pointers about how we can get work done more efficiently.

Futuristic headband

The mind reading actually involves measuring the volume and oxygen
level of the blood around the subject's brain, using technology
called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

The user wears a sort of futuristic headband that sends light in that
spectrum into the tissues of the head where it is absorbed by active,
blood-filled tissues. The headband then measures how much light was
not absorbed, letting the computer gauge the metabolic demands that
the brain is making.

The results are often compared to an MRI, but can be gathered with
lightweight, non-invasive equipment.

Detecting overwork

Wearing the fNIRS sensor, experimental subjects were asked to count
the number of squares on a rotating onscreen cube and to perform
other tasks. The subjects were then asked to rate the difficulty of
the tasks, and their ratings agreed with the work intensity detected
by the fNIRS system up to 83 percent of the time.

"We don't know how specific we can be about identifying users'
different emotional states," cautioned Sergio Fantini, a biomedical
engineering professor at Tufts. "However, the particular area of the
brain where the blood-flow change occurs should provide indications
of the brain's metabolic changes and by extension workload, which
could be a proxy for emotions like frustration."

New evaluation techniques that monitor user experiences while working
with computers are increasingly necessary, because a user may be
bored one moment and overwhelmed the next, said Robert Jacob, a
computer science professor at Tufts who is also involved in the
research.

"Measuring mental workload, frustration and distraction is typically
limited to qualitatively observing computer users or to administering
surveys after completion of a task, potentially missing valuable
insight into the users' changing experiences," Jacob said.

10 Things You Didn't Know About You Scientists Predict What You'll
Think of Next Quiz: Great Inventions Original Story: Computer to Read
Minds

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific
inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience
reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and
stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of
Science, Animal and Dinosaur Pictures, Science Videos, Hot Topics,
Trivia, Top 10s, Voting, Amazing Images, Reader Favorites, and more.
Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free
daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/computertoreadminds