The iPhone development team must have heard this song, “Jhuki Jhuki Si Nazar,” from the movie “Arth.” A perfect song by Jagjit Singh, which tells that face is a perfect place where you breed your expressions and notions. That’s why an announcement has come from the tech giant Apple that iPhone will exhibit a feature in the future to detect mental depressions and cognitive decline present in you. How? Let’s get to know more about this news from here.
Seabreeze Pi
Apple has collaborated with the University of California and Biogen (a pharmaceutical company) to develop a new feature in the future iPhones that will check mental depressions which you are going through. According to the Wall Street Journal report, Apple will use a sensor that will assess how a person types, the sleep period of a user, physical activity time, etc., to read current mental status. Apple is already working with the University of California to study stress and anxiety among humans, for which 3000 people volunteered. The project name of Apple UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) is Seabreeze, while that of Apple and Biogen is Pi.
Technology behind these Projects
The core and key technology that will run behind these projects is facial recognition. It is for sure that UCLA has somewhere assessed the facial expression of the volunteers. Accordingly, they will store the same data in their database as the train data. This data will allow the system to understand the current notion of the person). The concerned team, just for easy mapping, may give an index number to that particular expression. So, when the CV (computer vision) will read your face, it will compare the same with the index number. By that comparison, it will tell you your current mental health profile.
How will it help?
First of all, this feature can help showcase whether you are developing symptoms of severe mental diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, etc., or not. Considering the stats related to such diseases, that is no less than a catastrophe; globally, more than 44 million patients are suffering from this problem. In India, it is 4 million patients. Hence, it may help people to let them understand whether their current mental condition is not aggravating.
Final Remarks
Even the research is currently in its nascent stage. But, there is an assurance that this technology will bolster the concept of digital health and well-being. However, the concern will be somewhere on privacy that iPhone will store the data in offline mode and won’t upload it to the Apple servers in any way. For other tech articles and the latest news, click on this link.
