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In the mood for love? If so, you probably won鈥檛 want your phone to suggest a slasher movie or a thrash metal album. An app that works out how you are feeling could allow recommendation systems to only make suggestions that chime with that mood.

Called MoodExplorer, the app has been designed by Wenzhong Li at Nanjing University, China, and his colleagues. They say that assessing someone鈥檚 mood from moment to moment has been a key factor missing from personalised recommendation engines, often leading to inappropriate suggestions that people simply dismiss.

鈥淪omeone who likes romantic movies might prefer to watch an action film if they are feeling angry, perhaps, to relieve that anger,鈥� says Li. 鈥淪o a smart recommendation system really needs to take our moods into account.鈥�

Smartphones are ideal devices for such a system because they are filled with sensors that detect light, sound, motion and location, all of which might help deduce a user鈥檚 emotional state. The way you use your phone鈥檚 apps can also say a lot about your mood. Previous work has shown that phone use can pick up on depression, for example. Now Li and his colleagues are aiming for a fuller emotional palette.

Emotional audit

To create the app, the team trained a machine learning system on data from 30 students who were asked three times a day for a month if they felt happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid or disgusted. In tests, the AI could then guess the mood of participants correctly from their smartphone data 76 per cent of the time.

Li thinks that MoodExplorer could help humans interact with robots as well. A team in Sweden is for robots to let them pick up on a person鈥檚 mood through touch, for example. But MoodExplorer would give a robot extra information to work with.

Knowing a person鈥檚 emotional state could have wider benefits, says at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚 Media Lab. 鈥淭here are much more important reasons to sense mood than to modulate which ads we get,鈥� she says. 鈥淚f a person鈥檚 mood data shows that they鈥檒l get the most benefit from advice like: 鈥榯ake a walk with a friend鈥�, 鈥榗all your buddy, Joe鈥�, 鈥榮kip Facebook today鈥� or 鈥榞o to bed 2 hours earlier tonight鈥�, then that should be prioritised.鈥�