"I sense some mild stress" - StressSense
An up and coming smartphone app called StressSense, expected to launch next month, claims to be able to determine your stress level by listening to the sound of your voice. A collection of researches from Cornell, EPFL, Dartmouth, University of Neuchatel, and Intel Labs have banded together to create the "first voice bases stress detection and model adaptation in diverse real-life conversational situations using smartphones." (on Android, to be specific.)
In mock job interviews, the prototype’s stress recognition was 81% for people speaking indoors and 76% outdoors. Of course, the wide range of human emotion is never really fully recognized, even by humans, so a modern computer stands little chance. But, the StressSense app will try anyways! The software taps into your phones mic to listen to vocal stress indices like pitch, speaking rate, jitters and frequency. They say talking above 500 Hz indicates stress, but again, you could just be really, really happy. You can set it to listen in continuously or just during specific conversations. It gages your mood by comparing a recording of the user reading a 3-minute passage in a relaxed state. This recording is used to analyze and detect a clipped frequency spectrum and speaking rate changes. All the while logging when it thinks you are stressed.
StressSense concept and test results (via StressSense: Detecting Stress in Unconstrained Acoustic Environments using Smartphones)
This might not help people who are chronically sarcastic, passive aggressive or clinically stressed, still, this app will surely be able to tell between calm states and drunken rage. Developers say this will hopefully lead to better awareness of negative emotions, their causes and how to cope with them.
The StressSense app is expected to be launched as a plug-in to the free BeWell Android app. The BeWell app uses your phones GPS and accelerometers to keep track of sleep, exercise and socialization and scores them based on medical standards. Developer Hong Lu presented the StressSense app at the Ubicomp conference in Pittsburg in September.
Since StressSense is not available as of yet, I will assume it isn't working all that well.
Cabe