This Canadian Startup Can Track Your Emotions Through a Fitness Monitor

Jean-Philip Poulin was feeling "joyful" and "excited" when I interviewed him recently in Montreal. I know this because he showed me his real-time emotion metrics during our conversation, which were being parsed by a machine-learning algorithm that uses heart-rate data transmitted from his Microsoft Band 2 fitness tracker. Poulin is the COO of Sensaura, a Montreal-based software startup that proposes to bridge the gap between consumer wearables and affective computing. If its founders are as successful as they believe they will be, their product will hasten the inevitable future of emotionally intelligent machines: video games will know when you're bored, advertisers will know when you're swayed, and mental health professionals will know when you need a check-in. So far, progress in affective computing has depended on facial recognition software, which reads people's emotions pretty much the same way that people do: by looking at their faces for cues.