How to SMILE

Every time you smile at someone,
It is an action of love,
A gift to that person,
A beautiful thing.- Mother Teresa

The world is an interesting place, and the Internet provides constant reminders of just how interesting it is. Yesterday a friend alerted me to an Internet story - I assume it is true - about a Japanese train company that is using high-tech scanning to make sure its employees smile properly.

Smiling is pleasant - to do and to see - and a smiling employee is accordingly likely to provide a more pleasant experience for customers. We all have had the misfortune of dealing with disgruntled employees whose goal is apparently to make us as miserable as they are, never mind that we are trying to pay for whatever they are providing, whether it be lunch, postage stamps, or a new driver's license. So I applaud the attempt to make the folks we deal with more pleasing.

According to the story, each morning the 500 employees of the Keihin Electric Express Railway Company smile into a camera hooked up to a computer. Analyzed are facial features such as lip curvature and facial wrinkles. Spit back at each employee is an overall rating of his or her smile quality, from 0 to 100. If the smile quality is insufficient, the computer provides feedback - e.g., "lift up your mouth corners." The computer also prints out an ideal smile to which employees can refer throughout the day.The details of how this is all done were not mentioned in the story, but I did some poking around and found that a Japanese company, Omron, has sold several hundred devices called a Smile-Scan to those in the Japanese service industry. Each has a price tag of $7300. I assume this is the device used by the Keihin Electric Express Company.

The Smile-Scan scans a person's face and creates a three-dimensional model. Critical features of the model are then analyzed and quantified to gauge the intensity of the person's smile.