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Smartphone that feels your strain18 August 2012 byPaul MarksMagazine issue 2877. Subscribe and saveFor similar stories, visit theMental HealthTopic Guide WHAT really winds you up every day? Traffic on your commute? A frustrating boss? Or maybe something more subtle that you can't quite put your finger on... Your smartphone may soon be able to tell you where you encounter the most stress, thanks to the development of software that can recognise stress from the patterns in your voice. Called StressSense, the system is first trained to recognise someone's unstressed voice. To do so, the person must relax and read a 3-minute passage from a book, say, into their phone. StressSense then compares this recording to its preprogrammed knowledge of the physiological changes that stress induces, such as a faster speaking rate and a clipped frequency spectrum, and logs any instances of stress it detects. "Our stress model also adapts to different background noise environments," says Hong Lu of Intel in Santa Clara, California, who developed the system. In tests that included putting volunteers through mock job interviews, Lu's team found their prototype's stress-recognition accuracy is 81 per cent indoors and 76 per cent outdoors, where sound quality isn't as good. The team plan to make the system a plug-in to an Android app called BeWell, which uses a phone's accelerometers and GPS sensors to record people's activity and sleep levels. People will be able to set StressSense to either listen to their voice throughout the day, or to only activate when they are having a phone conversation. Lu says he hopes the software will boost awareness of everyday stressful events and help us cope. He will present StressSense at the Ubicomp conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, next month.
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I'm Gettin' StressedFri Aug 10 07:20:17 BST 2012 by Eric Kvaalen"Lu's team found their prototype's stress-recognition accuracy is 81 per cent indoors and 76 per cent outdoors..."
But what does that mean? If it means that 81% of the time it determines correctly whether someone is stressed, then it could be that people are usually not stressed and it simply says "not stressed" all the time! If it means that 81% of the time when the person is stressed it detects it, then that's not very impressive. A system that always says "stressed" would get 100% on that score!
Anyway, when they evaluate the thing, how do they know whether it was right or wrong? You have to have some "gold standard" way of knowing whether the person really was stressed or not.
Lies damned lies and statistics.
A little more information in the article might have answered the points you raise. Please, NS, don't sink to tabloid levels of reporting.
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