Recognition of emotions, thoughts, through interpretation of hand movements and gestures could be possible with an application designed by Dr. Konrad Juszczyk from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The device will help during psychotherapy sessions and job interviews.
"Within one hour of conversation we perform hundreds of significant hand movements. Many of them are manifestations of our emotions and thoughts. Some are performed unconsciously. Many go unnoticed by our interlocutors" - says one of the authors of the application, Dr. Konrad Juszczyk from the Faculty of Modern Languages, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
His application will be used to identify and interpret hand movements. This will help researchers to recognize emotions and thoughts, and disturbances in interpersonal communication. "We will shorten the work of those studying hand movements - psychologists and linguists. The app will replace the lengthy process of describing the movements of the hands and expedite their interpretation" - explained Dr. Juszczyk.
Automatic recognition of emotions and thoughts in a communication will be useful to all interested in exploring messages expressed in communications during psychotherapy sessions, focus groups, in-depth interviews, job interviews, public speaking, oral examinations. "Emotions and thoughts expressed by our hands will be open and known to all of us" - argues Dr. Juszczyk.
The application will be a collaborative effort of communications expert Dr. Konrad Juszczyk and MA. Kamil Ciecierski of Poznan University of Technology, who is a computer scientist. It will use MS Kinect motion sensor, used by children to play and adults to entertain, but also other devices that track movements, such as LEAP or MYO. Gestures and hand movements detected by sensors will be interpreted by comparison with a hand movements database, currently in development.
"The application is currently in the testing phase, running on a PC, and still requires many refinements before it can be used in the office of a psychotherapist, coach or other interested persons. We will present more details at the end of the project, in 2015" - said Dr. Juszczyk.
He carries out the work on the application with funds won in the popularisation competition Inter of the Foundation for Polish Science. The winners received PLN 100 thousand for the implementation of their research.
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