Say you're in a conversation and the other person becomes bored, or agitated, or whatever. If you recognize the boredom or agitation, you might choose to steer the conversation in some other direction. But what if you're autistic? Autistic people often get into all sorts of predicaments with their difficulty of recognizing emotions in others.

Though it sounds like something you'd see on a late night informercial, the MIT media lab has come up with a potential solution. New Scientist Technology - Device warns you if you're boring or irritating describes the contraption. Still has a way to go to become small and unobtrusive enough to use in most situations, but it's an interesting idea.

And it turns out it's not just for the autistic:

Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people's emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. "I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 per cent of them were bored or confused."

Hey, are you paying attention to this? Does this make sense?