Scientists have found that robots of the future may be able to measure how you feel by touching human skin. According to a new study published in the journal IEEE Visits, Researchers use skin conductance to understand how individuals feel. Skin conductance is a measure of the skin’s ability to conduct electricity and typically changes with sweat secretion and neural activity, representing different human emotional states.
Traditional emotion detection technologies such as facial recognition and speech analysis are often error-prone, especially under suboptimal audio-visual conditions. However, scientists believe skin conductance offers a potential solution, providing a non-invasive way to capture emotions instantly.
In the study, 33 participants’ emotional responses were measured by showing them emotionally arousing videos and measuring their skin conductance. The findings revealed different patterns for different emotions: fear responses were longest-lasting, suggesting the presence of an evolved alarm mechanism; family emotions, a mixture of happiness and sadness, were slower to respond; and humor elicited a quick but short-lived response.
“To date, few studies have examined dynamic differences in skin conductance responses under different emotions, although hyperresponsiveness is a key feature of skin conductance,” the scientists emphasize.
“The results of this study are expected to contribute to the development of techniques that can be used to accurately estimate emotions when combined with other physiological signals.”
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Combining skin conductance with other technologies
This research and conductivity technology rely on the fact that an emotional response to any situation triggers sweat glands, which changes the electrical properties of the skin. While the method is far from perfect, scientists believe that combining it with measurements such as heart rate and brain activity could improve the accuracy of emotion detection.
“There is a growing need for technologies that estimate subjective experiences based on individual physiological signals, providing them with emotionally arousing services,” the scientists wrote in the study.
“Therefore, further exploration of these physiological signals, particularly skin conductance responses, in this study could advance emotion recognition technology.”
The research has far-reaching implications because it could mean that future robots will not only be able to interact, but also be able to empathize with human users by understanding their emotional states through subtle physiological cues.