App monitors your physical and emotional responses to manage your relationships.
We’ve all been there: a day—or maybe even a week later—we say to ourselves “is so-and-so really that good of a friend?”
Or even “was the sex really that good?”
Enter an app that promises to know us better than we may even know ourselves.
Created by New York-based artists Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, PplKpr (“People Keeper”) connects to a wide variety of Bluetooth-enabled health monitor devices that create an emotional ranking system for the people in the user’s lives.
PplKpr uses both heart rate as well as its location via GPS. So it notices when, say, your pulse jumps, and you suddenly leave an area. Then, when it registers a noticeable change in either or both, it asks a set of basic questions to get a “feel” for what’s going on: where the user is, what’s happening, and who the user is with.
PplKpr “implements a complex metric called ‘heart rate variability’ that uses subtle changes in heart rhythm to determine your emotional state. This data is correlated with the people you interact with to determine who should be auto-scheduled into your life and who should be removed,” reported The Daily Mail.
After getting feedback, and learning who’s who and what’s what, it’s the app then gives a report, recommendations, and even actively unfriends people the user feels anxious around.
While created mainly as an investigative tool and art project, PplKpr nevertheless could be seen as a potential health care tool. It could, for example, be used by those who are unsure of their emotions around both certain individuals as well as activities, with the data being used by individuals or even by therapists.
Self-examination, after all, can be a tricky thing. It’s nice to see developers like McCarthy and McDonald working to create a new way to know ourselves and how we feel about the people in our lives.
Image source: The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
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