China has installed AI-powered gates and facial recognition cameras on school campuses to monitor student attendance and attentiveness, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Facial recognition is in widespread use in China, from verifying purchases in stores to street cameras that assist police in monitoring citizens. The Journal reports that the same technology is being used in schools to check “how often students check their phones or yawn during classes,” along with “robots that analyze students’ health and engagement levels,” and uniforms that carry “chips that track their locations.”
One parent told the Journal, “if it’s for our country’s research and development, I don’t think it’s a problem.”
In the video, the Journal shows young students in primary school, equivalent to elementary school in America, wearing headsets with lights that shine a different color depending on whether the student is paying attention.
The “brain wave sensing gadget… has three electrodes, two behind the ears and one on the forehead,” according to the Journal. “These sensors pick up electrical signals sent by neurons in the brain. The neural data is then sent in real time to the teacher’s computer,” and to a chat group for parents, who can “check every student’s score.”
“During this period, this student is a bit distracted,” one teacher told the Journal during a class, pointing at her computer screen showing the data from the headsets.
However, the Journal notes that “whether these devices really work and what they exactly measure isn’t as clear.”
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