You might wear computing's next wave By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer /Fri Oct 12, 4:01 PM ET/ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071012/ap_on_hi_te/wearable_computing [...] Graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab had black plastic badges around their necks that analyze multiple factors b including motion and speech patterns b to detect the level of engagement two people are exhibiting in a conversation. Information gathered from the badges, which weigh just a few ounces and are a bit smaller than a deck of cards, can be sent wirelessly to a computer or a phone to give their wearers helpful tips. Sales reps could be advised that a customer's interest seems to be waning. A doctor could be alerted to indications of depression in a patient being monitored remotely. [...] .. or, schools could require students to wear them, and then automatically alert the teacher when a student ceases paying attention. Or school administrators when a particular teacher's students consistently failed to remain engaged. Managers could be alerted when customer service reps. don't appear to be displaying an appropriate level of engagement with the customer, or when a sales associate doesn't meet the requisite level of cheeriness (although I'd guess that voice stress analysis is already doing this for telephone customer service reps). The possibilities are endless. The article suggests the could be used to analyze for "social network analysis" inside corporations... even more reasons to avoid corporate America in my book. Thomas ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE