Plus: Robotic Helicopter Swarms and Meteorite-Infused Wine.

The Smartphone as Therapist

New advances in mobile technology may soon make the smartphone more than an assistant, an addiction and a confident, but also a therapist that can provide crucial aid in our time of need.

Researchers at Northwestern University are developing a “virtual therapist” that would function through a person’s smartphone, monitoring the owner’s activity over several days and making a mood assessment based on its results. The project, known as Mobilyze, is intended to provide intervention during critical moments “when a behavioral prescription is most needed.”

“Mobilyze uses data from sensors already embedded in smartphones, such as GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and accelerometers,” CNET News explains. “The goal is to use this data to develop an automated system to detect people’s moods, which could be helpful to those who are prone to ignoring symptoms of depression.”

The team is working on a set of algorithms that would analyze each user’s state of mind by incorporating data such as the person’s location, activity, social context and what he or she is doing to determine the specific mood that person is in, and then evaluate whether the behavior seems normal or depressive. If the person is deemed depressed, the phone will help alert family and friends, and generate an automated text message or phone call encouraging the user to get in touch with someone or simply get out of the house.

“By prompting people to increase behaviors that are pleasurable or rewarding, we believe that Mobilyze will improve mood,” David Mohr, director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies and a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern, said in an announcement of the project. “It creates a positive feedback loop. Someone is encouraged to see friends, then enjoys himself and wants to do it again. Ruminating alone at home has the opposite effect and causes a downward spiral.”

The smartphone therapy system has already been tested on eight patients and been found to help ease their depression. Each subject began with a major depressive disorder, and they all displayed clinical and statistical improvement at the end of the treatment.

The Flying Robo-Swarm

Robotics scientists at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory have designed and built an impressive fleet of autonomous four-rotor micro-copters capable of flipping, changing direction and navigating through obstacles independently.

But their remarkable agility is only half the story. These robotic choppers can also fly in formation, performing incredibly precise maneuvers in perfect synchronization, as this video demonstrates:

Wine from Space

A good wine can carry a broad array of aromatic notes, but while fruity and woody wines are fairly common, the flavor of meteorite has been absent until now. A wine and space enthusiast has combined his two passions in a wine produced from an ancient piece of the cosmos that fell to Earth.

Astronomer and vineyard-owner Ian Hutcheon recently got his hands on a three-inch-in-diameter meteorite that is about 4.5 billion years old and crashed in Chile’s Atacama Desert approximately 6,000 years ago. He marinated the space rock in a wooden barrel of red wine for 12 months.

“That’s how long it took to complete something called ‘malolactic fermentation’: it’s a process that takes place after the primary fermentation. The first stage of the wine-making process — after harvesting the grapes, that is…converts grape sugar into alcohol via yeast. This takes around 25 days,” Discovery News explains. “The next stage, malolactic fermentation, is achieved by lactic acid bacteria, notably Oenococcus oeni.”

The process infuses some of the meteorite’s taste into the wine, enabling drinkers to sample a bit of extraterrestrial flavor. So far, Hutcheon has produced 10,000 liters of the wine, known as Meteorito. Next year, Hutcheon’s observatory will host the International Astronomy Congress, and it seems pretty clear what will be served with dinner during the conference.

“I’ve been involved in wines and astronomy for many, many years and I wanted to find some way of combining the two. When you drink this wine, you are drinking elements from the birth of the solar system,” Hutcheon told The Drinks Business. “The idea behind submerging it in wine was to give everybody the opportunity to touch something from space; the very history of the solar system, and feel it via a grand wine.”

Have a great weekend, folks.