Electric shock therapy can help with Facebook addiction

If you're addicted to Facebook, email, and other online habits, this could help shock you out of your addiction.

 

Enter Pavlov Poke, a mechanism that monitors your online usage of social networks and sends an electric shock to your keypad if you've overstayed on those sites.

 

"Anecdotally, I noticed a significant reduction in my Facebook usage after installing this device. However, more research is needed to determine whether this effect is lasting and significant for a wide population of users," Massachussetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. candidate Robert Morris said.

 

Morris, who started the project with fellow candidate Dan McDuff, said the gadget started out as a joke.

 

But he said the addiction to Facebook and social networking sites may need a serious discussion about how communication technologies are designed.

 

The gadget uses an application that monitors computer application usage, and a program that can produce an on-screen alert if a site is visited too frequently.

 

Such an alert will send a signal to an Arduino device connected to the computer via USB. The device in turn activates a shock circuit.

 

"Conductive metal strips are placed on the keypad. When the Arduino relay is triggered, a current is sent through the strips and through palm of your hand. Ouch!!!" he said.

 

On the other hand, Morris said many exposures may be needed before a lasting behavior change can be achieved.

 

Morris also advised against using such a setup on children. "Yikes. Please don't," he said.

 

Unpleasant but not dangerous

 

A separate report on TechCrunch quoted McDuff as saying the shock is not quite pleasant.

 

“The shock’s unpleasant but it’s not dangerous,” he said.

 

But the two also created a less invasive version of the system, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to "ask strangers to call the Facebook user’s phone and tell them to get off Facebook." — TJD, GMA News