Dell is working on gaming headsets that detect boredom

Dell is working on gaming headsets that will automatically detect if the user is bored and adjust the game’s difficulty accordingly. This should be done by measuring the user’s brain activity with sensors.

The headsets could also do the opposite; if he senses a lot of frustration with users, the headset can pass it on and the game can then give a clue as to how the user can proceed.

Besides for games, the headset can also use the perception of expressions of emotions in other ways. For example, the headset could indicate to a PC that the user is concentrating and automatically turn off notifications of incoming calls or emails, Dell says in a BBC story about the technology.

Current prototypes could only accurately guess how a user is feeling in half of the cases, but Dell thinks the percentage can go up. This can be done, among other things, by measuring more factors, such as sensors that can measure the oxygen in the blood or make a heart film. Dell thinks it could have such products on the market in 2017, but it has no concrete plans at the moment.

Dell is far from alone in dealing with this technology. Many companies are developing gadgets that measure the emotions of users based on various physical measurements. Some scientists are skeptical about this. Philips recently showed another experiment to let ALS patients control devices with their minds.