Limbic Genesis
It feels longer than 3 months ago that Sebastiaan and I first met on the Entrepreneur First accelerator program here in London. Wide-eyed and ready to start a business, we knew nothing of the trials to come. (Fortunately, some of those trials eventually became trial projects, but that would come later).
In contrast to our business strategy, our vision has remained constant since day #1: to create a world where technology understands us on an emotional level. A wild (some might say contrarian) vision. So, let me explain…
Humans have an innate desire to seek emotional connections in all things. It was this ‘emotional intelligence’ (EQ) that underscored the success of our Homo sapiens ancestors, allowing us to form social hierarchies and co-exist in groups, which eventually outcompeted the physically superior Neanderthals. Indeed, it is in our DNA to form deep and meaningful relationships with those around us… and it just so happens that today we are surrounded by computers.
Flash-forward 200,000 years and Microsoft brings us Windows OS — a product that, at its core, seeks to create more natural interactions between human and machine (the point and click). A more recent manifestation of this behaviour is illustrated in the emergence of voice assistants, where users take great pleasure in the humanity displayed by Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. We are continually forming more human relationships with our technology. But we’re not there yet. The next stage in our evolution is communicating with computers on an emotional level. Enter Limbic.
Limbic is a London-based startup building an emotion-recognition layer for all personal computers: smartphones, autonomous vehicles, voice assistants, and the hordes of other intelligent devices populating our homes. How do we do this? The neuroscientist in me is glad you asked!
Our human experiences of the world are coupled with emotional reactions. These emotions are encoded in a part of our brain called the ‘limbic system’ (hence our company name). We are exploiting correlations between the activity in the limbic system, and the nervous signals that control our heart rate. By collecting heart rate data through wearable sensors like the Apple Watch, and deploying our machine learning algorithms, we are able to recover the underlying emotional state of the user. Magic!
‘Awesome!’ (I hear you exclaim). ‘What now?’ Well, if tomorrow is about Limbic algorithms being installed on all human-interacting computers, then today must be about integrating our tech with a small subset of these. To this end, we have just finished the first version of our stress-detection SDK, and are undergoing trial projects with three popular smartphone apps (throwback to the first paragraph). With the resulting aggregate user base of 100,000 people, we are refining our algorithms, improving their accuracy, and extending our recognition models to detect other emotional states.
We believe that the future holds a new concept: digital empathy. Self-driving cars that could take the hairpin bend at high speed, but sense it would make their passengers feel uneasy and instead move at a slower pace. Voice assistants that suggest music for your current mood, not inadvertently playing your ex’s favourite Coldplay song. Smart fridges that can tell when you’re comfort eating, and suggest you may not want a second slice of strawberry cheesecake . The possibilities are endless… we can’t wait.
