Things That Think: UWG-Communicator

Research Photo

Slides from Fall 2004
presentation (PDF)
(sponsors only)

Groupwear

UWG-Communicator
A system for sensing the status of the people on your "buddy list."

Who:	From Brother: Miyuki Komuro plus four researhers From the Media Lab: Prof. Sandy Pentland, and his Human Dynamics group, plus Prof. Roz Picard and the Affective Computing group.
When:	2004
Where:	MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Why:	Brother wanted to take advantage of Picard's work on stress analysis and Pentland's work on face-to-face communications.
How:	Using Groupwear technology from the Human Dynamics research group to capture sensor data.

Details

Brother sought a technology that could sense and display the presence or status of a person in an instant messenger "buddy list." The system evolving out of the collaboration will tell people in a corporate environment if someone they are trying to contact is busy and cannot be interrupted. The system will gather head-nodding, EKG, and possibly speech data, to determine this. Then the information will be shared using wifi.

Next, testers will try out the wearable system and the researchers will see how these individuals feel about such personal information being available.


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