Microsoft designs smart bra to combat emotional eating
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> Since conducting this research, the team has moved to testing the use of Affectiva Q3 bracelets, which detect mood, so that both men and women can participate. The pilots, say the authors, have been "quite promising" for both sexes.
Discontinued site: http://www.qsensortech.com/ Press Release: http://www.affdex.com/news-article/affectiva-accelerates-inv...
Imagine if this could notice your boredom behaviors and prompt you to work out or study, if it gave you a solid reminder when you were watching more TV than you thought was useful, etc. Even if it noticed when you'd been sitting for more than an hour and prompted you to get up and stretch.
That would be fucking awesome.
So, we can rest assured that the embedded system and controller board will be equipped with software that defaults to an always-upload mode, dumping all data to microsoft.com. The device will be completely unusable and it's data inaccesible without a one-time prompt agreeing to the EULA.
Is Microsoft trying to convince women to submit to continuous lie detector monitoring, under the auspices of weight control?
What? I get it, its in fashion to hate on MS but come on these are just ridiculous assumptions. Let's look at it from a technical point of view. If you want an always-upload device, at the current state it would require a substantially battery which needs to be recharged atleast every 12hours. Now who will buy a heavy bra that fails in half a day?
Lie detector.. really? because its in the evil interest of a corporation to know when only women are lying.
How much battery power do you need, in order to pipe readings from a sensor into a tiny 2GB cache of flash memory?
Then, the data syncs with your laptop, because how else will you find out what the readings are, without some kind of GUI interface showing you some charts and graphs that interpret the raw sensor data?
The sync software will come bundled with a "share your data, oh goody!" feature that defaults to constant sharing mode (dark pattern). You charge the battery whenever you sync. In the presence of an internet connection, it uplinks to MsSmartBra.com, where data is monitored and tracked so everyone knows your high score! Yay!
My initial response was to your paranoic bit on being always on. Without the help of a median device, for data to be always uploaded or for constant lie detection, a wifi/4g module has to used. Which in itself is a battery sucker and not to mention, adds to weight of the bra making it uncomfortable.
But consider the standard use case for undergarments. It will continuously collect data any time it's worn. That could turn out to be a lot of data, even in a store-and-forward data collection strategy. And really, bras are most commonly worn in social situations, so most data will be collected while the subject engages in social interactions.
I point this out as a possible "lie detector" because that's my immediate association with respect to electrodermal and EKG sensors used in combination. Add in respiration (a small leap since this will be strapped to your rib cage) and you would have the complete recipe for a lie detector. That part doesn't seem to be included, although my free association still stands.
I'm hypothesizing that Microsoft might be taking aim at a strategy to crowdsource ambient lie detector data, because that sounds like a really interesting data set, with lots of opportunities for exploitation.
What motivation could there possibly be, beyond "pure evil", as a drive to study this sort of thing? Perhaps a sense of adventure and bold curiosity for the future that lies ahead? I dunno, but it's already well established that Microsoft is a known collaborator with the DoD and most alphabet agencies. Maybe it's a sureptitious fishing expedition?
Why women only? Because a complete lie detector session involves respiration. So, if it's a sureptitious data collection program, you start with the question: how do we convince people to adorn themselves with cumbersome blood pressure cuff, EKG, electrodermal and respiration sensors that we usually wrap around their chest? Who would ever wear anything tightly strapped around their chest? Wait! Women do that all the time, whenever they wear a bra!
Good work, Johnson! Here's a two million dollar budget! In six months, be ready to show me something that will convince people to willingly share respiration, heart rate, and skin conductivity via the web. Then we'll restrospectivly analyze the raw data set, blindly without context, and try to pick out the liars, and develop a common statistical model of deceptive behavior, ironically collected using deceptive tactics.
I very strongly disagree with this, but I know on HN this makes me an absurd fool with no data to back myself up with. Ya know, on my myers briggs[1] test that took last year, and also about 20+ yrs ago when I was in highschool the results were the same. I have a strong sense of spiritualness and connectedness. I'll link this blog[2] but I suspect its contents will be dismissed around here as unscientific baseless nonsense. Not trying to change anyone's mind here, just showing how I feel. Maybe some readers will better understand the other people in the world, like myself, who don't think like vulcans[3].
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
2. https://findingourwayhomeblog.wordpress.com/tag/myers-briggs...
As for spirituality, if it is how you feel, it's nothing wrong. The way human body functions is not a matter of agreement between people anyway.
Also being reasonable and logical doesn't automatically make you emotionless.
If it turns out that the engineer's solution works better, well, a) it's up to the rest to come up with a better solution, and b) I can't blame the engineer for coming up with an engineering solution. I actually find it refreshing that they are working on that instead of Adwords/Zynga/NSA stuff.
And of course, this bra/bracelet thingy doesn't rule out the alternatives. If you don't like the engineering approach, feel free to try anything else on the list.
I already tried this subject on HN and failed miserably. There are a few things in life that I kinda trust my gut-feeling more than science[1]. Or rather, in the same way there was a time where jewelry was made from radioactive material because science couldn't detect the danger yet; one day science may find that previously undetected thing that cellphones emit and the human body absorbs. I have no proof and this "logic"(fear) could be applied to anything. It's just a gut feeling I have.
1. This probably already qualifies me as insane & absurd by 98% of HN readers. I just don't think the science of humans can completely capture & comprehend the universe or even the human body. I think we're more than the sum of our parts, but don't ask me to prove it. I can't. :(
This makes no sense. While it's easy to argue that cell phones are safe because of non-ionizing radiation, that's now how science works. The reason we feel that cell phones are safe is that we have 25 years of evidence showing no statistically significant link between cell phone use and cancer.
Even if there's a magical field that a cell phone produces that causes cancer (something we can't detect in any way), we'd still detect that cancer with a higher rate than in a population that doesn't use cell phones, or uses them with a lower frequency.
Interphone study says no risks? The results are far from conclusive.
http://interphone.iarc.fr/interphone_results.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20483835 - "CONCLUSIONS: Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation."
This conclusion has sentences that contradict each other. E.g. Heavy long-term use has higher negative numbers, compared to the "normal use" that causes "no increased risk" ?!
Claims that interphone found any statistically significant risk increase due to the use of cell phones is not backed up by the data in any way, shape, or form. (But this, of course, doesn't mean there is no risk, but that we haven't seen it. Future studies could find such a risk, as unlikely as that may be.)
It also has a remarkably low sample size (n=593). This is in contrast to the Interphone study (n=~14000), which found no statistically significant correlation between brain cancer and cell phone usage.
I'm not sure where you're getting the sample size of 14,000 ... though different pieces of the study had upwards of 5,000 participants.
This is simply not valid science. It's not blinded, it's not representative of the population at large (or these would've come out of a randomly selected population), and it's not properly controlled. It's junk science.
I will add it to my read list though, thanks.