Hacking Happiness by John Havens Read Free Book Online Page A

their motion sensors, I could send a text to my wife if I slapped the table hard enough while laughing. We’ll get to the point when we may feel machines know our emotions better than we do.

    Note that my lowered heart rate finding due to smiling does have scientific precedent. In “De-Stress in Three Seconds,” author Cassie Shortsleeve reports about a study conducted by Sarah Pressman and other researchers from the University of Kansas in which college students were asked to hold chopsticks in their mouths to simulate a smile before facing a stressful situation. Compared to their non-chopstick counterparts, smilers had lower heart rates and reduced stress, leading researchers to believe the physical triggering of facial muscles to smile sends a message to your brain that says, “You’re happy—calm down.” 7
    So what if I did a longitudinal study around my Cardiio experiment for a year, adding in whatever sensors I could think of? Would there come a point where I could prove to you that a certain amount of data proved I was experiencing a certain emotion? Probably. Keeping in mind, as in the case of taking a survey, that I know I’m recording myself and have a bias toward laughing.
    But my point is not to quantify emotion for its own sake. My goal is to demonstrate how intimately connected we are to the data we’re outputting and capturing in ways we’ve never done before. Mobile and home sensor technology is fairly cutting-edge, as is the trend of average consumers being able to capture their data. And remember, data is a currency. People pay for it. Think how Kmart’s PR value would go up if they could prove that a thousand people doing my Cardiio test watching their commercial lowered their heart rates over time and significantly improved their health.
    The idea may seem far-fetched until you hear about a company like Neumitra, featured in the MIT Technology Review article “Wrist Sensor Tells You How Stressed Out You Are,” written by David Talbot. Neumitra has a device called bandu that’s compatible with smartphones that can measure stress via increased perspiration or elevated skin temperature. 8 To research the piece, Talbot wore the device and tried to recite the alphabet backward in front of a group of strangers, resulting in his stress increasing by 50 percent as measured by wrist sweat and temperature.
    Companies like Affectiva have also developed technology along these lines to recognize human emotions in the form of facial cues, letting brands test to see whether ads are engaging with consumers. 9 Much like my Kmart example, if a thousand people watching a certain video don’t laugh as measured by Affectiva, it’s a good sign the commercial is a clunker. I see this model moving to the social TV arena, 10 which is the trend of people interacting with live television programs or with other fans during prerecorded shows.
    Whether facial recognition technology employed by Affectiva or Microsoft Kinect is reading our expressions during a show orour phones are measuring our reactions, our emotional output will be captured in one form or another. In terms of measuring stress, I think about watching a show like 24 and wonder at what point the TV would shut off if my heart rate got too high. Or when I’d get a call from my insurance carrier telling me to watch Modern Family to calm down before my rates got increased.
    The emergence of quantified tracking of behavior signals that the avataristic form of well-being is fading in importance. While people will always follow influencers and repeat what they say, as we grow more comfortable with our actions being tracked, we’ll be able to quantify emotions, or at least agree on the proxies for emotion based on physiology. Our actions will reveal our true characters. And reputation will more closely mirror our true selves versus the avatars we currently broadcast to the world.

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    ACCOUNTABILITY-BASED INFLUENCE
In the twentieth century, the invention