Would You Let an App Play Matchmaker in Your Love Life?

January 24, 2017

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App monitors your physical and emotional responses to manage your relationships.

The "people keeper" app virtually manages 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

M. Christian

M.Christian (they/them) loves nothing better than exploring the intersections of sex and technology—and speculating on the future of both. A highly regarded erotica writer they have six novels,12 collections, 100+ short stories, and 25 anthologies as an editor to their name. Their non-fiction regularly appears in many sites, but they're most proud of being a regular contributor to Future of Sex.

Of their erotic fiction, Tristan Taormino said that “M.Christian is a literary stylist of the highest caliber: smart, funny, frightening, sexy—there's nothing [they] can't write about… and brilliantly.”

Reflecting their unique ability to sympathetically and convincingly write for a range of genders and sexual orientations, their stories have appeared in multiple editions of Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, The Mammoth Books of Erotica, and others. Their collection of gay erotic fiction, Dirty Words, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

While a majority of their stories have been collected into books like Dirty Words, their fondness for combining sex and science fiction is clearly evident in collections that include Rude Mechanicals, Technorotica, Better Than The Real Thing, Skin Effect Effect, Bachelor Machine, and Hard Drive: The Best Sci-Fi Erotica of M.Christian.

As a novelist, M.Christian’s versatility is on full display with Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Brushes, Painted Doll; and the somewhat controversial queer BDSM/horror/thrillers Finger's Breadth, and Me2.

M.Christian has worked on the industry’s production side as an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books and as a Publisher for Digital Parchment Services. The latter dedicated to celebrating the works of science-fiction legends such as William Rotsler, Jerome Bixby, Jody Scott, Arthur Byron Cover, Ernest Hogan, and James Van Hise.

Covering topics like BDSM safety, sexual education, senior sexuality concerns, queer and gender issues, plus reviewing a variety of sex tech products, M.Christian’s non-fiction has appeared on sites like Kinkly, Tickle.Life, Sexpert, Queer Majority, Sex for Every Body, and—of course—their ongoing work for Future of Sex.

If there’s anything M.Christian enjoys more than writing, it’s teaching. A featured presenter, sometimes with their friend Ralph Greco Jr, at national sex and BDSM events, they have lectured on kink play (with an emphasis on safety), polyamory, boosting sexual creativity, and erotica writing--for beginners or those wanting to go pro.

M.Christian is a cohost on two popular sex-education podcasts: Love’s Outer Limits with Dr. Amy Marsh and Licking Non-Vanilla with Ralph Greco, Jr.