Wearing technology
When Rosalind Picard visited an amusement park recently for her son’s birthday, she wore four high-tech bands, one on each wrist and ankle. The specialized cuffs, developed by Picard, professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and MIT Media Lab researchers, tracked a critical component of a place where dizzying rides intentionally submit visitors to disturbing g-forces: excitement levels. The bands gauge a person’s emotional response to stimuli by tapping skin conductance, an indicator of the state of the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the body’s flight-or-fight response by ramping up responses such as heart rate and blood pressure. When downloaded and analyzed, Picard’s peaks in excitement registered in the form of a red line that spiked dramatically at times during the day. Predictably, her system went into overdrive on the biggest, fastest rollercoasters and on one ride she preferred “not to talk about.” But surprisingly, the...