Social-emotional agnosia

Imagine you are walking down the street in the summer time, everyone around you is smiling in a way that makes yourself happy by just walking down this street. Or you enter a room and see a friend looking sad so you decide to sit down next to him and talk. Or you have a conversation with a person on a random topic and you can literally hear and see the amount of curiosity she has for it.

However, now imagine you can't. It's not that you don't want to, but all of these non-verbal aspects of our perception just don't mean anything to you. Life would be completely different. This phenomenon is known as Social-emotional agnosia.

With modern technology, especially AI and its subset field machine-learning, this problem may be not to hard so solve anymore.

On the other hand, there is Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Wallace Friesen who created the Facial Action Coding System (F.A.C.S.). FACS is a Modelling System that contains every possible movement the human face is able to make and therefore every possible emotional expression. Based on Ekmans and Friesens research there are seven universal emotions: Happines, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust, Contempt.

Now put these two together and you may create a very elegant system allowing everyone with Social-emotional agnosia to detect and categorize emotional facial expressions. Maybe glasses with a camera attached onto it. The visual field then contains seven different colours (one for each universal emotion) and the darker a colour is represented the more intense the other persons face is expressing it.