How would you feel about your phone telling you how happy you currently are? This is a situation you could be in before too long thanks to research being carried out at Cambridge University right now.
The idea they have had is that the app they have developed could use a mixture of data from the phone and the user’s own input.
The app is called EmotionSense and the people behind it believe that it is the first ever mobile phone app to combine these two factors to advise how happy the user is. There are other apps which do a similar sort of thing but they don’t take into account the same broad range of factors as this one does.
EmotionSense works by taking the information the user has reported about their mood together with data such as the number of text messages they send, the noisiness in the background and who they are talking to. The app forms part of an overall project which aims to help people enjoy better health and feel better using their mobile phones.
More Than Just Happy or Sad
One of the people involved in the team is called Dr Jason Rentfrow and he is a senior lecturer in the field of psychology at Cambridge University. He said that many of the mood tracking apps around just now only look at the question of emotions as “feeling happy, sad, angry or neutral”.
However, he pointed out that part of the benefit of their approach is that it will show “how moods vary” from one person to another. Overall, you can expect to take 8 week of using the app to unlock all of the sensor and get back meaningful results. At the moment it is only going to be released for Android devices, with other to follow.
