Can a robot help you find your true love on a dating app? Why not, says a graduate student at NYU’s InteractiveTelecommunications Program.

According to Nicole He, her True Love Tinder Robot knows your real, not-faking-it response to each profile appearing on Tinder better than you do. Best of all, the highly rational robot is only too happy to respond for you by either swiping right (to indicate a match) or swiping left (to reject).

Emotional mess no more!

It works like this: You open Tinder and then place your phone in front of the robot hand. Next, you lay your own two hands on the sensor pads. As you are looking at a Tinder profile, the robot will read your galvanic skin response and determine whether or not it's a good idea for you to get involved with this other human being. If the robot reads an attraction — if your hands are sweating — it will swipe right. If your hands remain dry, though, the robot will swipe left and you will never have to see a photo of that person again.

True Love Tinder Robot
True Love Tinder Robot Courtesy of Nicole He

And while the magic robotic hand is doing all this dirty swiping work for you, it is also making fun comments… just like a real best friend!

“I can read your feelings,” the robot says in a voice devoid of feeling. “No match here.”

Why would you ever want to bother with your own flawed, uncertain, all-too-human decision-making process? The True Love Tinder Robot is here to do it for you, its roots reaching deep into already familiar practices.

“We trust that algorithms on dating sites can find us suitable partners,” He wrote on her blog. “Simultaneously, we use consumer biometric devices to tell us what's going on with our bodies and what we should do to be healthy and happy. Maybe it's not a stretch to consider what happens when we combine these things.”

Mashup Technology

As He suggests, the idea of tapping into the autonomic nervous system to read emotions is far from new. Since the 19th century, possibly earlier, philosophers (including William James in his essay, "What is an emotion?") have theorized emotion is nothing more than simply feeling the physiological changes our bodies undergo in response to our perceptions of a person or event. And, commonly, the physical effects of negative emotions have received more attention than positive feelings.

However, in the 2011 study, “Feeling Good: Autonomic Nervous System Responding in Five Positive Emotions,” Arizona State University scientists explored the sunny side of feelings and their link to bodily effects. The research team collected physiological data from 37 college-aged participants tasked with rating their emotional response to nine individual slides projected on a screen. Positive emotions, including love and happiness, linked to differences in autonomic nervous system responses, the researchers discovered. Heart and respiration rates along with galvanic skin response and other data did in fact correlate to each participant's self-reported response.

The True Love Tinder Robot, then, has a solid basis in academic truth or, as He expresses it, the robot is "definitely, absolutely, 100 percent no doubt" scientific. To learn more, watch here:

True Love Tinder Robot from Nicole He on Vimeo.