With approximately 39 million people in the United States currently owning a smart speaker, technology that caters to our needs is more and more ubiquitous, taking up ever more of our personal space.

But smart devices can do so much more than merely playing our favorite song or searching the internet when we ask them to. Smart speakers may soon be able to diagnose us or tell how we are feeling.

At Wired Health — an annual conference that brings to the fore the latest developments in health tech — neuroscientist and technologist Poppy Crum, Ph.D., gave a talk aptly titled "Technology that knows what you're feeling."

Treading a fine line between ominous and hopeful, the title made a powerful point: soon, consumer technology may know our mental and physical states before we do.

But how, exactly, can technology achieve this? How can we harness its potential to help us elucidate mental and physical conditions, and what role does empathy play in all of this?

These are some of the questions that Crum answered at Wired Health — an event which this year took place at the Francis Crick Institute in London, United Kingdom.

What is empathetic technology?

Crum, who is the chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco, CA, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, defines empathetic technology as "technology that is using our internal state to decide how it will respond and make decisions."

So how can technology read our internal states? Crum's talk at Wired Health featured some interesting examples of neurophysiological "giveaways" that the right type of technology can now pick up easily — a phenomenon the scientist referred to as "the end of the poker face."

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