What mood are you in today?
Are you ecstatic and enthusiastic, or are you sad and drained of energy?
Well, I can’t figure that out but maybe this amazing software which is in its nascent stages can.
You agree with me when I say not all days are the same. Some days are full of hope and life and some are not very positive and it’s natural to feel different. It is relatively easier to cope with negative days when you have your loved ones, be it, friends or family, around you because they make the best possible efforts to behave and support you according to your mood. But what about days when you don’t have them around? or when you live away from them? During such days it’s just you and your phone or laptop (or just maybe a tub of ice cream). When you’re alone and feeling low and disheartened, all you have to lean on is your movies and music for comfort. As a result, the emotion recognizer enters the picture to personalize that experience. It scans your face with the camera on your devices, such as your phone or laptop, and predicts your emotion, based on which you will receive recommendations. And hold on, this goes both ways. This program won’t leave your side when you’re all enthusiastic and cheerful. It might recommend you the best hype music and fun movies to break a lung or two laughings.
The technical aspect of the model is a neural network model, using CNN(Convolutional Neural Network). The code uses libraries like TensorFlow and OpenCV. Tensorflow is a symbolic math library based on dataflow and differentiable programming. Data from this library is majorly used to train and test different deep neural networks. This training and testing are required to make the brain of the model understand what it is dealing with. The idea of this smart system is to come up with intelligent ideas to make a person happy. Many people in the world feel lonely and little gestures can uplift their spirits.
Though this model only judges your emotion from your facial expression, on an advanced scale it can be pushed into security systems that will use artificial intelligence to predict thieves by looking at their body language. So extending it to the whole body will help us with more data, which will get more accuracy. The model can be built with experts from the field of body language and psychology to help in its versatility. In 2019, there were over 1,233 theft cases per 100,000 inhabitants reported in the union territory of Delhi in India as per Statista's data. So if this smart system is built into an IoT system many thefts would be prevented before they took place. Now you would say that what if the system failed in identifying the person’s intention correctly, in that case, we can have an SOS system in place where the shop owner will be informed about the suspicious person and if the shopkeeper arrives in the danger then he/she could push the SOS button to call in the police for help. This model can also run facial recognition for people with previous criminal records and help shopkeepers beware of their customers.
About 800,000 people die by suicide worldwide every year, of these 135,000 (17%) are residents of India, a nation with 17.5% of the world population. So this model can work on this too. We can analyze the body language of people suffering from depression and send alerts to their near and dear ones when they behave suspiciously. Or on the contrary, when the patients are feeling low, the model can recognize it and connect them to counselors or people they can talk to. Not only in these two domains it can be sourced out to many other such scenarios.
These smart and intelligent systems will soon be the revolution we are looking for. Age of automation and artificial intelligence. Though it will be far-fetched to say that robots will operate without any human interference but with systems like this vigilant efficiency will increase tenfold and also deaths due to unnatural causes will reduce too. People will have an AI assistant to talk and reach out at the time of need. Rather a robot friend who will understand their feelings by just looking at them and then work on cheering them up. IBM Watson has already made its mark in this field and is continuously expanding on this idea. Other tech giants are also developing systems that are human-like and such humanizing technologies can help the world be a happier and safer place, a place where crimes are reduced and no lives are lost due to loneliness or lack of adequate mental care.
Once there is enough data, there will eventually be a day that your devices can read your emotions!
