- Your computer -- that auxiliary brain that lives outside
your skull -- soon may be issuing public updates on what's happening inside
your body.
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- Using tiny sensors, transmitters and some software, researchers
at Sandia National Laboratories have turned personal computers into advanced
polygraph machines that they say are capable of monitoring people's emotions
and abilities.
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- Here's how it would work: You're in a meeting, and each
person in attendance is hooked up to a computer that's monitoring their
perspiration and heartbeat, reading their facial expressions and head motions,
analyzing their voice tones and then presenting them with a running account
of how they are feeling. This information will also be transmitted to everyone
else in the meeting.
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- Talking too much? A pop-up window appears on the screen
to tell you to shut up. Feeling edgy? A message reminds you to calm down.
Got a big account or project to assign? Scan the feed to see which employee
is feeling the perkiest that morning.
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- The idea, according to Peter Merkle, who heads the Mentor/PAL
program at Sandia, is to develop ways to understand and improve human performance,
particularly in military or other high-risk situations.
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- "The future of human-machine systems can be a bright
one, if we develop technology that enables us to be more fully human,"
Merkle said.
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- Preliminary tests of Mentor/PAL indicated that using
the system improved teamwork and resulted in a calmer, less-stressed workplace
since everyone had insight into how their team members were feeling, Merkle
added.
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- But privacy advocates think that Mentor/PAL is eerily
similar to HAL, the computer that took over the spaceship in the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey, and believe that monitoring physical information
such as heartbeat and perspiration is a violation of an individual's right
to keep personal medical information private.
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- "This is very troubling from a privacy standpoint.
There is no universal protection for medical information, and certainly
no national standard for protecting medical information gathered in the
workplace," said Tena Friery of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse,
a nonprofit consumer information and advocacy program.
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- "HIPAA, the national medical privacy standard, only
covers medical privacy in the workplace in very limited ways, such as when
it has to do with medical insurance provided by the employer in a group
health plan or self-insured plan. This seems to be one more example of
a growing trend of employers to gather worker's medical information to
address some business issue," Friery said.
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- Merkle pointed out that Mentor/PAL is being developed
primarily for military use, for situations where people are making high-consequence
decisions.
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- "Professionals like soldiers in Special Forces units
and technical professionals in positions of high trust in the homeland
security community must give up degrees of personal privacy in exchange
for the privilege of serving others," said Merkle.
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- "In those kinds of roles, mission success is the
most important concern," Merkle said. "A Navy SEAL knows that
concealing a knee injury from their team leadership is not a good thing
to do. Their personal desire to be on active duty is outweighed by the
need to give the team commander reliable information about their ability
to perform their job, because lives may depend on it."
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- Mentor/PAL relies on precedent to decide whether people
are currently functioning at a highly reliable, moderate or poor level.
It's no different from making coaching decisions based on baseball statistics,
said Merkle. "Against left-handed batters in the last 200 night games,
this person hits .207, so pinch-hit the .298 person for him.
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- "So it's not so much about figuring out when people
are insufficient," Merkle said. "It is about enabling them as
individuals and teams to be their best."
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- Mentor/PAL uses commercial face-recognition software
and off-the-shelf sensors to measure muscle activity, heartbeat, blood
oxygen, and breathing depth and rapidity.
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- The only custom-built components are the wire interfaces
by Autonomechs and software by MindTel.
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- Sandia researchers tested Mentor/PAL by observing how
the system worked while two teams played the military strategy game Rainbow
Six: Raven Shield.
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- "If someone got really excited during the game and
that's correlated with poor performance, the machine told him to slow down
via a pop-up message," said Merkle. "Or it told the team leader,
'Take Bill out of loop, he's had too much coffee and too little sleep.
Sally, though, is giving off the right signals to do a great job.'"
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- Team members reported that the whole process was a little
awkward at first, but they soon forgot they were being monitored.
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- One corporate executive who heard about the project e-mailed
Merkle and asked, "Where do we get the version that tells people they
are boring in meetings? Please hurry and send that system to us. A truck
full or two should cover us."
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- The commercial release schedule for the system is still
undetermined. Sandia researchers intend to further develop Mentor/PAL first,
in joint projects with the University of New Mexico and Caltech.
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- "I honestly can't see corporations daring to use
this monitoring system on their employees. People would not accept this
-- it's just plain spooky," said Joe Aldrama, who counsels companies
and individuals on how to increase their efficiency.
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- "But I could see it being used on a personal level,
as a sort of biofeedback tool to monitor your own performance," Aldrama
added. "Say you are a person who tends to overreact to things, you
could use this to remind yourself to take a few deep breaths before you
commence with the biting off of heads."
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- The Sandia team agreed that figuring out ways to provide
personal control of the information flow would be paramount to protect
privacy when and if Mentor/PAL is used by private enterprises.
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- Merkle added that science still has a way to go in developing
software systems that can accurately predict what people are capable of
doing.
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- People and their behaviors cannot be described or re-created
by a computer program realized in binary code in a silicon substrate. But
Merkle believes the key is in gathering physical information and correlating
it with an ever-evolving database of statistical probabilities.
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- "Our brains and our bodies are as one, it seems,"
said Merkle. "Our gut feelings are as essential to our higher thought
processes as the power plant is to your PC."
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