pplkpr is an application that monitors your physical and emotional response when you are with a friend. This way it can determine whether that person is a positive or negative influence on your life, helping you prevent so-called toxic friends.
pplkpr is an application that performs tracking, analysis and self-management of your friendships. Using a smartphone and a bracelet, pplkpr monitors your physical and emotional response based on the people around you, optimizing your social life. The application uses a bracelet that measures your heart rate implementing a complex metric called "heart rate variability", which uses subtle changes in your heart rate to determine your emotional state. These data are correlated with the people you interact with in order to determine with whom you should spend more time and whom you should keep away from your life, since they are considered a toxic friend.
The algorithm of pplkpr is based on how social relationships affect you. To do this it takes into account your emotional state, whether symptoms of excitement or stress, when you are with a person. Based on this, the app looks for patterns in your relationships and tells you which of your friends affect your life positively and negatively. With those with whom you get along, the app will write text messages or schedule outings, while with people that pplkpr considers toxic for you, it will directly delete them from your contact list. This is not the first time an algorithm controls these decisions; not to go too far, dating sites have a similar algorithm based on the ideal person for each user.
pplkpr (from the English people keeper, which could be translated as "social guardian") was created by Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald through a test carried out with a group of students at Carnegie Mello University, United States. For a week, the group was monitored while measuring their stress levels during their social life. The results were perfectly functional and the application is available for free on iOS systems. Now, is it worth letting an algorithm decide your inner circle of friends? You decide!
