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January 15, 2007 1:18 PM

Do you know of any examples where facial animation is used as a medical biofeedback interface?

A few years ago, I came up with the idea of using animated faces, like this, in biofeedback applications. Since we all have grown up watching faces and reacting to them, the learning curve has been well travelled, making animated faces the ultimate in user-friendly graphs. Imagine teaching a deaf child how to speak by having him/her interact with an animated character. The character reacts, mimics mouth movements, and changes expression based on the child's vocal output. So the child's verbal success is reflected in, for example, the happy expression on the model. The same program could be used to lower a heart patient's blood pressure, or treat virtually any other disorder where conventional biofeedback is used. I approached several companies that use facial animation, like Pixar, but they won't touch ideas like this for fear of infringing their own R & D. It seems to me that both technologies (animation and biofeedback) are well developed, and putting them together in medical applications would be easy, extremely useful, and have many advantages over conventional biofeedback techniques. I have not heard of anyone doing so. Have you?

posted by weapons-grade pandemonium to technology (4 comments total)

It's an interesting idea, but I wonder if you've considered the psychological effects of using faces? If you're hooked up to a blood-pressure monitor and the feedback displays a look of unalloyed terror, this would tend to make my blood-pressure go up rather than down.

With less snark: I wonder how children will react to a "disapproving" face? Will they view it as a challenge to do better, or feel humiliation and shame? A face can carry lot of emotional baggage. If the "ethnicity" of the face is different from the child's, will the child respond differently? Maybe there are good reasons why no one else does this.
posted by SPrintF at 1:34 PM on January 15, 2007

Obviously you could tweak the software to respond in the neutral to positive zone.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 1:42 PM on January 15, 2007

And tweak the ethnicity to something neutral or even not quite human - just outside the Uncanny Valley, but on the cartoonish side. Even a look of "unalloyed terror" would be softened by having it appear on a face that seems more exaggerated anyway.
posted by wanderingmind at 2:55 PM on January 15, 2007

Exactly. I originally had envisioned using something like Toy Story characters. That's why I contacted Pixar. You could even zoom inside the mouth to show tongue position, etc. The characters would also be the instructors.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 3:09 PM on January 15, 2007