Smile trainer

Some people are blessed with naturally pleasant resting faces. I am not. I am, however, blessed in that I:

• Live in an age where we know how to train computers to recognize facial expressions
• Have access to pre-trained facial recognition models and easy to use wrappers for them
• Took a high school psychology course that introduced me to the concept of operant conditioning
• Work sitting in front of a machine that has a camera pointed at my face, a GPU capable of running inference on small neural nets, and a pair of headphones capable of emitting mildly unpleasant noises

I built a frown-activated buzzer to make me smile more (requires camera access; data stays on your machine). It seemed the natural thing to do.

Does it actually work?

Maybe. I think I've observed a weak effect in myself, but it's hard to say whether that's because I've been using the app or because I spent a bunch of time thinking about smiling while I was building it. No formal measurements. n=1. File this one under "untested ideas that should work in principle".

Published 2023-12-22

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