Device measures goosebumps, may be used to moderate room temperatures, stereo music

This might give you the chills.

Korean scientists have developed a device that is going to measure the emotional states of human beings and use the findings to control your present experience.

From the press release for the product:

Can emotional states be measured quantitatively, and if so what would advertising, manufacturing and social media companies do with that data? Imagine a world in which a consumer’s real-time physical and emotional response helped to determine his/her experience of music, online ads or the temperature in the room.

That may not be so far away — a team of researchers at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea has developed a flexible, wearable 20mm x 20mm polymer sensor that can directly measure the degree and occurrence on the skin of goose bumps (technically known as “piloerection”), which is caused by sudden changes in body temperature or emotional states.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg, according to the developer:

While more work still needs to be done to correlate such physical measurements with emotional states, the work suggests that quantitatively monitoring goose bumps in real-time as an indicator of human physical or emotional status is possible, which could pave the way for personalized advertising, music streams or other services informed by directly access to the emotions of the end user.