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Electronic Monocle Uses Biofeedback to Track Your Favorite Websites

The internet is a fire hydrant of content. Keeping track of the pages you enjoy is a pain. A team of UK design students has a conceptual solution: Amoeba, an electronic monocle that files away the pages you find most interesting, as measured by your biofeedback response. It's the emotion-tracking Google Glass you always wanted!

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Designed by Sanya Rai, Carine Collé and Florian Puech, students at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, London, Amoeba packs three different types of sensors to monitor your emotional state. Heat sensors near your mouth measure how fast you're breathing, a camera pointed at your eye watches your pupil size, and a skin sensor monitors for increased perspiration.

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By correlating your physiological response with the digital content you're consuming, Amoeba can figure out which sites and pages you find most interesting. Or breathtaking, or perspiration-inducing, or, I suppose, pupil-dilating.

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"We envision that you would wear the Amoeba device before you start your web-based research," Sanya Rai explains on her website. "As you go through different webpages, the device senses your bio-data and quantifies your interest. When you are done, you can then go to the Amoeba app and select the keyword you were looking at.

"The app will show you a time-based summary of all links visited, layering them based on how interesting you found the content," Sanya explains. "You also have the option of seeing the route you took to arrive at a certain page, thus enabling better reflection and self awareness." In small tests, the team says a prototype of the device was able to correctly identify the article a subject found most or least interesting nine times out of 10.

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The device as designed looks a little on the spacey side, but then again I'm sitting here with 38 tabs open, some of which I haven't actually looked at since before I filed my taxes. Maybe a monocle isn't such a bad look. [Vimeo via Motherboard]