How Emotion Technology Can Improve Science and the Future of Autism

Computers, robots, and wearable technologies are gaining the ability to sense, recognize, and respond intelligently to human emotion. This talk will highlight several important findings made with these recent advances, including surprises about the "true smile of happiness," and how a wearable built to measure autonomic stress in autism led to unusual electrodermal signals on the wrist that reveal new insights into deep brain activity, with implications for anxiety, epilepsy, sleep-memory consolidation, mood disorders, pain measurement, and more. How might these technologies transform the way we do research in autism? How might we use these findings to enable more comfortable social-emotional communication and future improved health experiences for people on the spectrum?