Add this to the list of things people now need to rely on their phones for — deciding who to hang out with and who to cut out of their lives.
A new app wants to do just that.
Pplkpr, pronounced “People Keeper,” is an app that pairs up with wrisbands and devices that can measure your heart rate in real time. Using an algorithm to monitor the change in heartrate, the app ranks people in your life according to how happy, anxious or angry they make you, and will let you know the people it thinks you should hang out with more.
According to the project’s promotional video, the app will help you “optimize your social life” and make the most of your “emotional bandwidth.”
pplkpr from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.
Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, the creators of the project, tested it out at Carnegie Melon, and found that students liked using it as a justification for not hanging out with people who made them feel angry.
pplkpr from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.
“While we’ve been working on pplkpr, sometimes it starts to look like a reminder of a potentially dystopian future,” McDonald said in the video.
“But it could also seem like something very optimistic,” McCarthy added.
