In Japan, AI can spot sleepy students. Will it ‘improve education’ or ‘control’ children?
- Developers say the technology will allow educators to focus on teaching while engaging a sleepy student and encouraging participation
- The use of such technology in classrooms has to be regulated, or it could harm students’ development, says an academic
Japanese researchers have devised a system that combines thermal imaging and artificial intelligence to identify pupils who have dozed off in class.
Scientists from Osaka Kyoiku University have been working with Kansai Denki Kogyo, an energy company based in Higashiosaka, to develop the equipment, which they say is designed to alert teachers when a student is falling asleep and help the instructor better engage the child.
Not everyone is convinced by that explanation, however, with one academic suggesting the system appears to be designed to “control” children and that it could be harmful to their development without regulations on how it is used in classrooms.
Developers at the university’s Centre for Education Innovation Design compiled numerous images of people standing, sitting, sleeping on a chair and in other situations, and fed the image data into an AI system. Based on the thermal imprint that each activity returned, the technology was able to identify the same activities in a real-world setting.
When deployed in a classroom, the developers said, the system had an accuracy of more than 90 per cent.
“To improve the quality of education requires objective observation and recording,” said Professor Fumio Nakaya during a demonstration event earlier this month.
“Until now, humans have taken on this task, although the workload has become too heavy. My motivation for starting this research was to utilise modern technology to support those processes.”
