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Andy’s Quick Hits (276): Tracking Mental States Through Your Skin — In Real Time
Imagine if you are working and your stress levels are increasing, and then automatically soothing music is turned on to calm you down. Or alternatively if you are heading towards that after lunch dip of drowsiness an upbeat energetic music is turned on to energise you.
This sounds like a sort of mind-reading device of the future, but this is a possibility according to Rose Faghih of NYU Tandon School of Engineering — and without having any invasive electrodes or implants in your brain but through a simple skin patch!
How so you may ask?
Well, skin conductance is a well-known way to measure things like stress responses. Your skin reacts very quickly at microscopic levels to things like stress and mental disturbances. We’ve known that for a long time and skin conductance measure are often used in research — it is cheap, non-invasive, and a good measure of many things.
The really tricky thing through is being able to accurately predict these brain or mind states and match these to the biological data and additionally to be able to do this in real time. For this Faghih and her team have developed much more accurate ways of modelling skin responses by mapping this to 3D modelling of sweat glands and amongst other things, how they…
