A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have invented a gadget that can "read" emotions. Their invention, The Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthetic, may offer a sort of computerized nudge to folks who can't tell when they've become boring.

Here's how the MIT researchers describe their invention which, they say, "may be used as an assistive and therapeutic device for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder":

"In psychology, theory of mind or "mind-reading" describes our ability to attribute mental states to others from their behavior and to use that knowledge to guide our actions and predict those of others. Mind-reading is fundamental to our social functions, decision-making, perception and memory. We are building a wearable computer with a computational model of mind-reading. The prosthetic infers affective-cognitive mental states from head and facial displays of people in real time, and communicates these inferences to the wearer via sound and tactile feedback. Our research addresses open research questions pertaining to whether machines can augment social interactions in a way that improves human to human communication."