Brain Power announced that the company’s “Fidgetology” method was featured today by Amazon Web Services on their Machine Learning Blog.
Fidgetology™ rapidly quantifies body language – to assess mental health, or to estimate enjoyment of ads or other media. Brain Power developed Fidgetology in collaboration with Amazon Web Services using the company’s newest cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer visions tools -- which were announced only a few months ago.
Fidgetology has uses across many businesses, though it was originally designed to quantify improvements in symptoms of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and autism.
“I kept noticing that children moved and squirmed less when they used our augmented-reality social-skills apps,” says Brain Power founder Dr. Ned T. Sahin, who invented the Fidgetology concept and framed the blog post. “Yet we had no way to measure the improvement objectively, nor to summarize attention-related patterns of body motions in our hours of clinical video. Once we invented this method, I realized it could help all who care how much an audience is engaged with their material.”
“We wanted to make the application really easy for anyone to try,” says Brain Power’s Runpeng Liu, who authored the system architecture, step-by-step tutorial, and sample algorithms in the blog post. “No matter what your industry, you can feed in video of people experiencing your media content, and get a rapid, single-page result.”
What is this single output like? In much the way that a good weather map can summarize the wild complexity of earth’s weather or even climate, this single image and plot can describe body motions and gestures across a long session. Extending the map analogy, with enough data one can zoom in to any level of detail desired.
Fidgetology can allow producers of content to estimate audience enjoyment, for instance of movies, ads, social media, TV shows, video games, political campaigns, speeches, online courses, or classroom teaching.
Brain Power plans to offer Fidgetology-based products to schools for automatically monitoring students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), to digital health and pharmaceutical companies, and to those conducting clinical trials impacting mental and behavioral health. For more information, please visit the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning blog, and Brain Power’s website.
