ESP (not the extra-sensory kind)

Rana el Kaliouby, a post-doctoral associate at MIT’s Media Lab, is developing the ESP, or emotional-social intelligence prosthesis. The ESP consists of a small camera mounted on a person’s neck and a computer mounted on the belt; it is being developed to helps autistic persons better decode their own facial expressions. As detailed in Technology Review:

[El Kaliouby] says that though it is an open question whether people with autism make the same kinds of facial expressions that others do, they may learn the relationship between faces and emotions best by starting with their own. Those who feel anxious when looking at faces may feel most comfortable watching themselves. Parents and friends can also wear self-cams and offer their videos for viewing. Future versions of the system may use two self-cams, each communicating wirelessly with the other, to provide real-time instruction. One person’s ESP might send a message–”She’s losing interest”–to another person’s, which could alert its wearer with, say, a message whispered through an earphone.

The ESP actually films the wearer’s face, analyzes the movements of eyebrows, mouth, and head movements, and graphs these according to whether the wearer appears to be thinking, expressing interest, and other mental and cognitive states.

El Kaliouby describes herself as interested in developing “mind-reading machines”; she refers to the notion of theory of mind in developing a “computational model of mind-reading.” While whether or not autistic persons can or cannot “mind-read”—whether or not they have theory of mind—is not agreed upon by all parties, I find it intriguing that El Kaliouby’s ESP has the autistic person focusing on his or her own facial expressions first, rather than on being about the autistic person trying to understand another person’s expressions. As for whether or not autistic persons’ facial expressions are the same as those of non-autistic persons, I am curious to know what any autistics think.