Machines equipped to monitor our emotions will soon be everywhere

The age of machines is often painted as a cold, calculating place where harsh efficiency is the only principle. Don't tell that to Pepper, a humanoid robot announced in June that's claimed to be emotionally intelligent. A companion-bot able to hold conversations and know the emotions of who it's communicating with, Pepper can see and interpret frowning, laughing and even analyse your body language.

Pepper is an effort to promote the concept of a human operating system by collecting the most precious data of all - our emotions. Although, for now, Pepper is little more than a gimmick awaiting shoppers in Japanese stores, it's fitting that it has been designed for SoftBank Mobile, one of Japan's largest phone networks, because it is smartphones - not robots - that are beginning to collect and use emotional data on a grand scale.

It started with face-recognition technology, which is now a standard way of unlocking a phone, but the next generation of devices could use sensory technology to gauge and interpret our reaction to everything. There are now vending machines that use face recognition to recommend purchases - and brands would love to know your reaction to watching their advertisements.

"As with face-recognition vending machines, phones can collate data from a wide range of sources … things like who you called, and what photos you've taken - and arguably summarise it for you," says Marcus Mustafa, global head of user experience at marketing and technology agency DigitasLBi.

So what does emotional data do?

"It aims to track a user's emotional reactions - such as joy, delight, surprise, excitement, fear and sadness - to particular external events," says Diana Marian, marketing strategist at London-based Ampersand Mobile, who studied the links between emotions and rationality at New York University.