Advancing human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion

The goal of this project is to develop techniques to remove identifying information from wearable and phone data to protect patients’ priva…

In the quest towards general artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have explored developing loss functions that act as intrinsic motiva…

Excessive stress can decrease office workers' productivity and negatively impact overall health. This project aims to predict office worker…

We are conducting EEG studies to identify the musical features and musical interaction patterns that universally impact measures of arousal…

This study aims to bring objective measurement to the multiple "pulse" and "pulse-like" measures made by practitioners of traditional Chine…

This study attempts to examine humans' affective responses to superimposed sinusoidal signals. These signals can be perceived either throug…

This project examines how the expression granted by new musical interfaces can be harnessed to create positive changes in health and wellbe…

We are developing statistical tools for understanding, modeling, and predicting self-harm by using advanced probabilistic graphical models …

With the LEGO Group and Hasbro, we looked at the emotional experience of playing with games and LEGO bricks. We measured participants' skin…

The wide availability of low-cost, wearable, biophysiological sensors enables us to measure how the environment and our experiences impact …

Occupational stress can be described as a harmful emotional and physical response that occurs when high demanding job conditions cannot be …

Physiological arousal is an important part of occupational therapy for children with autism and ADHD, but therapists do not have a way to o…

We are performing long-term measurements of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity on patients with epilepsy. In certain cases, autonomic …

Teaching multiple AI agents to coordinate their behavior represents a challenging task, that can be difficult to achieve without training a…

Project OverviewDepression is one of the most prevailing health problems in the world. Many recent publications have provided statistics ab…

We are applying learnings from the SNAPSHOT study to the problem of changing behavior, exploring the design of user-centered tools which ca…

Current methods to assess depression and then ultimately select appropriate treatment have many limitations. They are usually based on havi…

You can test whether a website is usable by making wire frames, but how do you know if that site, product, or store is emotionally engaging…

A smile is a multi-purpose expression. We smile to express rapport, polite disagreement, delight, sarcasm, and often, even frustration. Is …

Got Sleep? is an Android application to help people to be aware of their sleep-related behavioral patterns and tips about how they should c…

What do customers really think about your company or brand? Using skin conductance sensors, we measure what excites and frustrates customer…

Social-emotional communication difficulties lie at the core of autism spectrum disorders, making interpersonal interactions overwhelming, f…

This project aims to build a modular lighting system where users can customize the design and lighting patterns.

We are looking at the emotional experience created when children learn games. Why do we start games with the most boring part, reading dire…

Have you ever wondered what makes an ad memorable? We have performed a comprehensive review of literature concerning advertising, memory, a…

To help people improve their reading of faces during natural conversations, we developed a video tool to evaluate this skill. We collected …

A small number of studies support the notion of a functional relationship between movement stereotypy and arousal in individuals with ASD, …

We have been developing comfortable, safe, attractive physiological sensors that infants can wear around the clock to wirelessly communicat…

We are characterizing changes in autonomic nervous system (ANS) during sleep. This can potentially provide insight into circadian rhythms a…

We have developed a low-cost device that can wirelessly detect a beating heart over a short distance (1m) and does not require any sensor p…

Companies would like more new products to be successful in the marketplace, but current evaluation methods such as focus groups do not accu…

Affect as Index is a tool that takes group physiological data as input, aggregates it across different demographic dimensions, and attaches…

Recent findings in affective neuroscience and psychology indicate that human affect and emotional experience play a significant and useful …

People who have difficulty communicating verbally (such as many people with autism) sometimes send nonverbal messages that do not match wha…

We have developed a novel market game, Prediction Game and Experience Sharing (PreGES, pronounced PreGuess), that harnesses people's collec…

Light is an important factor in the regulation of all kinds of circadian rhythms in our body, such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestion…

This project develops new theory and algorithms to enable computers to make rapid and accurate inferences from multiple modes of data, such…

We are exploring innovative use of cell-phone Bluetooth technologies for consumer research and customer measurement. We have developed a s…

SmileSeeker is a novel, machine-vision system that captures and provides quantified information about nonverbal communication where social …

How can technology help us understand ourselves better? In order to measure the physiological arousal of children with sensory challenges s…

In collaboration with the Early Childhood Cognition Center at MIT BCS, we are developing sensor-enabled toys and infant affect sensors with…

A robotic computer that moves its monitor "head" and "neck," but that has no explicit face, is being designed to interact with users in a n…

Shybot is a personal mobile robot designed to both embody and elicit reflection on shyness behaviors. Shybot is being designed to detect hu…

While modern communication technologies mean that we can connect to more people, these connections lack the affective subtleties inherent i…

Sometimes learners have to focus while experiencing strong emotions (e.g., family problems).�They may also face challenges in perservering …

The Self-Cam is a wearable camera apparatus that consists of a chest-mounted camera aimed at the wearer�s face. Self-Cam was designed to be…

The wonder that occurs while watching a good magic trick or admiring a gorgeous natural vista is a strong emotion that has not been well st…

As the population ages, acuity in one or more sensory channels often diminishes or may be totally lost. Augmenting or compensating for loss…

Given motion capture samples of Charlie Chaplin's walk, is it possible to synthesize other motions�say, ascending or descending stairs�in h…

HandWave is a small, wireless, networked skin conductance sensor that can be worn or used in many different form factors. Skin conductance …

Affective Remixer is a real-time music-arranging system that reacts to immediate affective cues from a listener. Data was collected on the …

The goal of this project is to produce a guilt detector. We have created an experiment that is designed to produce feelings of guilt of var…

People naturally express frustration through the use of their motor skills. The purpose of the Affective Tangibles project is to develop ph…

The computer's emerging capacity to communicate an individual's affect raises critical ethical concerns. Additionally, designers of percept…

EmoteMail is an email client that is augmented to convey aspects of the state of the writer during the composition of email to the recipien…

The goal of this project is to develop tools to sense and adapt to a user's affective state based on his or her mouse behavior. We are deve…

This project developed efficient versions of Bayesian techniques for a variety of inference problems, including curve fitting, mixture-dens…

The purpose of the INNER-active Journal system is to provide a way for users to reconstruct their emotions around events in their lives, an…

This research aims to classify gene expression data sets into different categories, such as normal vs. cancer. The main challenge is that t…

We have created a system for data collection, annotation, and feedback that is part of a longer-term research interest to gather data to un…

"I can't do this" and "I'm not good at this" are common statements made by kids while trying to learn. Usually triggered by affective state…

Driving is an ideal test bed for detecting stress in natural situations. Four types of physiological signals (electrocardiogram, electromyo…

BioMod is an integrated interface for users of mobile and wearable devices, monitoring various physiological signals such as the electrocar…

We design and evaluate an ambient blood glucose level visualization and feedback system that uses an Ambient Orb for diabetes self-care and…

The saying, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" may be appropriate for stress. Many people are unaware of their stress level, an…

In this project, we propose a new Bayesian receiver for signal detection in flat-fading channels. First, the detection problem is formulate…

The Interface Tailor is an agent that attempts to adapt a system in response to affective feedback. Frustration is being used as a fitness …

We have developed a system to recognize posture patterns and associated affective states in real time, in an unobtrusive way, from a set of…

The Affective Mirror is an attempt to build a fully automated system that intelligently responds to a person's affective state in real time…

Recognizing non-verbal cues, which constitute a large percentage of our communication, is a prime facet of building emotionally intelligent…

This research project is concerned with building computational models for the automatic recognition of affective expression in speech. We a…

Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. Ce…

PAF (paroxysmal atrial fibrillation) is a dangerous form of cardiac arrhythmia that poses severe health risks, sometimes leading to heart a…

While instant messaging clients are frequently and widely used for interpersonal communication, they lack the richness of face-to-face conv…

The aim of this project is to build a database of natural speech showing a range of affective variability. It is an extension of our ongoin…

The galvactivator is a glove-like wearable device that senses the wearer's skin conductivity and maps its values to a bright LED display. I…

The Touch-Phone was developed to explore the use of objects to mediate the emotional exchange in interpersonal communication. Through an ab…

ASQ investigates ways to teach social-emotion skills to children interactively with toys. One of the first goals is to help autistic child…

The "Affective Carpet" is a soft, deformable surface made of cloth and foam, which detects continuous pressure with excellent sensitivity …

This project is aimed at building a system to recognize emotional expression given four physiological signals. Data was gathered from a gr…

Mr. Java is the Media Lab's wired coffee machine, which keeps track of usage patterns and user preferences. The focus of this project is to…

The Conductor's Jacket is a unique wearable device that measures physiological and gestural signals. Together with the Gesture Constructi…

The Affective Tigger is a plush toy designed to recognize and react to certain emotinal behaviors of its playmate. For example the toy ent…

We are building a system that can watch for certain signs of stress in drivers, specifically stress related to talking on the car phone, …

AboutFace is a user-dependent system that is able to learn patterns and discriminate the different facial movements characterizing confusi…

AffQuake is an attempt to incorporate signals that relate to a player's affect into ID Software's Quake II in a way that alters game play. …