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Comment by Timothycquinn | Hacker News Reader

If the scanning system has a database of your regular pulmonary patterns, can't this be used, albeit crudely, to detect the emotional state of a subject?

With automation I can't help but think that this is unfortunately going to bring George Orwell's dystopian vision closer to reality.

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You don't even need a database of pulmonary patterns. The human baseline and deviations from it is plenty strong enough for crude emotion state detection.

See also https://news.mit.edu/2016/detecting-emotions-with-wireless-s... (using wifi to detect heartbeat) , https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs231a/prev_projects_2016/fin... (various video-based methods) , https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/ (and see the video), and a lot of other things.

The paranoid in me wonders if this isn't released because it's irrelevant now, since even in the civilian world with civilian technology the "laser" would seem to be nearly superfluous.

Considering that polygraphs are mostly a sham, I'd say no, these couldn't be used to detect emotional state.

Polygraphs supposedly detect intentional lies. That seems much harder than just trying to get a general sense of "are they relaxed or anxious", "are they happy or sad."

The sham related to polygraphs is trying to divine some correlation between a person's instantaneous emotional state and the veracity of their communications. The biometrics polygraphs measure are very real.

> With automation I can't help but think that this is unfortunately going to bring George Orwell's dystopian vision closer to reality.

You only need to look across the globe to find a situation where this exists.

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-emotional-surveillance...

I took a class in college on lie detection technology from someone who worked doing research. Lie detectors don't detect lies or emotions, they measure heart rate, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response, which only tell you when the individual is experiencing something; could be pain, anxiety, fear, anger, happiness, a lot of things. Maybe they are lying, maybe not, not really good enough evidence with those things.

Heart rate isn't going to give you as much information, and you aren't in a controlled environment, so I imagine things like exercise could effect it. It can be detected with a camera recording your face and a simple algorithm though, so biometric data from an airport could definitely give you someone's pattern.

This laser presumably detects vibrations, so I'd be interested to see if something as simple as listening to music with a bit of base as you walk could effect it.

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