The End of Seizures and Depression?: New Biosensors That Warn of and Potentially Prevent Health Conditions.

The objective tools of engineering should be brought to the challenge of understanding emotions in people, and this could change the way we approach many health conditions, including epilepsy and depression, according to Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., a professor in the Media Laboratory and the director of affective computing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She coined the term affective computing and defined it as computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately influences emotions. She is also a founding member of the first IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Technology, which was the precursor to the quantified-self movement that promotes self-monitoring using wearable sensors and other technologies.