Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
MIT Media Lab
Project OverviewDepression is one of the most prevailing health problems in the world. Many recent publications have provided statistics ...
We are applying learnings from the SNAPSHOT study to the problem of changing behavior, exploring the design of user-centered tools which ...
Complex and expensive medical devices are mainly used in medical facilities by health professionals. IDA is an attempt to disrupt this pa...
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 engagi...
SmileTracker is a system designed to capture naturally occurring instances of positive emotion during the course of normal interaction wi...
A smile is a multi-purpose expression. We smile to express rapport, polite disagreement, delight, sarcasm, and often, even frustration. I...
MACH, My Automated Conversation coacH, is a system for people to practice social interactions in face-to-face scenarios. MACH consists of...
With skin conductance sensors, we map out what frustrates and excites customers as they shop�from layout to wanting to touch the product....
Got Sleep? is an Android application to help people to be aware of their sleep-related behavioral patterns and tips about how they should...
Working with the New World Symphony, we measured participant skin conductance as they attended a classical concert for the first time. Wi...
What do customers really think about your company or brand? Using skin conductance sensors, we measure what excites and frustrates custom...
This work builds on our earlier work with FaceSense, created to help automate the understanding of facial expressions, both cognitive and...
Can we recognize stress, mood, and health conditions from wearable sensors and mobile-phone usage data? We analyze long-term, multi-modal...
Persons on the autism spectrum often report hypersensitivity to sound. Efforts have been made to manage this condition, but there is wide...
We are examining autonomic sleep patterns using a wrist-worn biosensor that enables comfortable measurement of skin conductance, skin tem...
Cardiocam is a low-cost, non-contact technology for measurement of physiological signals such as heart rate and breathing rate using a ba...
Social-emotional communication difficulties lie at the core of autism spectrum disorders, making interpersonal interactions overwhelming,...
People express and communicate their mental states–such as emotions, thoughts, and desires–through facial expressions, vocal nuances, ges...
This project aims to build a modular lighting system where users can customize the design and lighting patterns.
Emotions are often conveyed through gesture. Instruments that respond to gestures offer musicians new, exciting modes of musical expressi...
How can we better understand people�s emotional experiences with a product or service? Traditional interview methods require people to re...
Frame It is an interactive, blended, tangible-digital puzzle game intended as a play-centered teaching and therapeutic tool. Current work...
Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have intense, focused interests. These interests, when harnessed properly...
We are looking at the emotional experience created when children learn games. Why do we start games with the most boring part, reading di...
Have you ever wondered what makes an ad memorable? We have performed a comprehensive review of literature concerning advertising, memory,...
We propose a set of customizable, easy-to-understand, and low-cost physiological toolkits in order to enable people to visualize and util...
To help people improve their reading of faces during natural conversations, we developed a video tool to evaluate this skill. We collecte...
A small number of studies support the notion of a functional relationship between movement stereotypy and arousal in individuals with ASD...
We are automating recognition of positive/negative experiences (valence) and affect from facial expressions. We present a toolkit, Acume,...
We have been developing comfortable, safe, attractive physiological sensors that infants can wear around the clock to wirelessly communic...
We are characterizing changes in autonomic nervous system (ANS) during sleep. This can potentially provide insight into circadian rhythms...
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...
We are developing wearable sensors that measure cardiovascular parameters such as heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) in real tim...
Companies would like more new products to be successful in the marketplace, but current evaluation methods such as focus groups do not ac...
Affect as Index is a tool that takes group physiological data as input, aggregates it across different demographic dimensions, and attach...
Recent findings in affective neuroscience and psychology indicate that human affect and emotional experience play a significant and usefu...
People who have difficulty communicating verbally (such as many people with autism) sometimes send nonverbal messages that do not match w...
We have developed a novel market game, Prediction Game and Experience Sharing (PreGES, pronounced PreGuess), that harnesses people's coll...
Light is an important factor in the regulation of all kinds of circadian rhythms in our body, such as heart rate, blood pressure, digesti...
In this research, a proactive emotional health system, geared toward supporting emotional self-awareness and empathy, was built as a part...
This project develops new theory and algorithms to enable computers to make rapid and accurate inferences from multiple modes of data, su...
We are exploring innovative use of cell-phone Bluetooth technologies for consumer research and customer measurement. We have developed a...
SmileSeeker is a novel, machine-vision system that captures and provides quantified information about nonverbal communication where socia...
How can technology help us understand ourselves better? In order to measure the physiological arousal of children with sensory challenges...
In collaboration with the Early Childhood Cognition Center at MIT BCS, we are developing sensor-enabled toys and infant affect sensors wi...
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...
Shybot is a personal mobile robot designed to both embody and elicit reflection on shyness behaviors. Shybot is being designed to detect ...
While modern communication technologies mean that we can connect to more people, these connections lack the affective subtleties inherent...
Sometimes learners have to focus while experiencing strong emotions (e.g., family problems).�They may also face challenges in perserverin...
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 ...
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 ...
As the population ages, acuity in one or more sensory channels often diminishes or may be totally lost. Augmenting or compensating for lo...
Given motion capture samples of Charlie Chaplin's walk, is it possible to synthesize other motions�say, ascending or descending stairs�in...
The Emotion Bottles are tangibly enticing objects that embody three emotions: angry, happy, and sad. When a bottle is opened, a vocal ou...
The technology in this project changes facial expressions in videos without the system knowing anything in particular about the person's ...
HandWave is a small, wireless, networked skin conductance sensor that can be worn or used in many different form factors. Skin conductanc...
Affective Remixer is a real-time music-arranging system that reacts to immediate affective cues from a listener. Data was collected on th...
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 v...
People naturally express frustration through the use of their motor skills. The purpose of the Affective Tangibles project is to develop ...
The computer's emerging capacity to communicate an individual's affect raises critical ethical concerns. Additionally, designers of perce...
EmoteMail is an email client that is augmented to convey aspects of the state of the writer during the composition of email to the recipi...
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 de...
This project developed efficient versions of Bayesian techniques for a variety of inference problems, including curve fitting, mixture-de...
The purpose of the INNER-active Journal system is to provide a way for users to reconstruct their emotions around events in their lives, ...
This research aims to classify gene expression data sets into different categories, such as normal vs. cancer. The main challenge is that...
We have created a system for data collection, annotation, and feedback that is part of a longer-term research interest to gather data to ...
"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 sta...
Driving is an ideal test bed for detecting stress in natural situations. Four types of physiological signals (electrocardiogram, electrom...
BioMod is an integrated interface for users of mobile and wearable devices, monitoring various physiological signals such as the electroc...
We design and evaluate an ambient blood glucose level visualization and feedback system that uses an Ambient Orb for diabetes self-care a...
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, ...
In this project, we propose a new Bayesian receiver for signal detection in flat-fading channels. First, the detection problem is formula...
The Interface Tailor is an agent that attempts to adapt a system in response to affective feedback. Frustration is being used as a fitnes...
We have developed a system to recognize posture patterns and associated affective states in real time, in an unobtrusive way, from a set ...
The Affective Mirror is an attempt to build a fully automated system that intelligently responds to a person's affective state in real ti...
Recognizing non-verbal cues, which constitute a large percentage of our communication, is a prime facet of building emotionally intellige...
This research project is concerned with building computational models for the automatic recognition of affective expression in speech. We...
Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. ...
PAF (paroxysmal atrial fibrillation) is a dangerous form of cardiac arrhythmia that poses severe health risks, sometimes leading to heart...
While instant messaging clients are frequently and widely used for interpersonal communication, they lack the richness of face-to-face co...
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 ongo...
The galvactivator is a glove-like wearable device that senses the wearer's skin conductivity and maps its values to a bright LED display....
The Touch-Phone was developed to explore the use of objects to mediate the emotional exchange in interpersonal communication. Through an ...
ASQ investigates ways to teach social-emotion skills to children interactively with toys. One of the first goals is to help autistic chi...
The "Affective Carpet" is a soft, deformable surface made of cloth and foam, which detects continuous pressure with excellent sensitivit...
This project is aimed at building a system to recognize emotional expression given four physiological signals. Data was gathered from a ...
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 ...
The Conductor's Jacket is a unique wearable device that measures physiological and gestural signals. Together with the Gesture Construc...
The Affective Tigger is a plush toy designed to recognize and react to certain emotinal behaviors of its playmate. For example the toy e...
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 confu...
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...