Keeping an AI on astronauts’ emotions

With deep-space missions posing all kinds of new challenges under extreme conditions, preserving a healthy emotional state will be one of the main hurdles for astronauts. The European Space Agency (ESA) is looking into the possibility of assessing their mood and lifting their spirits when deemed necessary. All this should be done in real time and therefore autonomously, on-board the spacecraft, because of the considerable delay in communicating to Earth – if there’s a connection at all.

The past decade has also witnessed the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), bringing massive improvements to data analysis. Sentiment analysis, for example, was traditionally used only for texts, but thanks to recent advancements in machine learning, deep learning and computer vision, it’s now also starting to be applied to audio and image data. This opens the door to a facial and voice sentiment analysis system as envisioned by ESA.