Patent Applications as Glimpses into the Sociotechnical Imaginary: Ethical Speculation on the Imagined Futures of Emotion AI for Mental Health Monitoring and Detection

Patent applications provide insight into how inventors imagine and legitimize uses of their imagined technologies; as part of this imagining they envision social worlds and produce sociotechnical imaginaries. Examining sociotechnical imaginaries is important for emerging technologies in high-stakes contexts such as the case of emotion AI to address mental health care. We analyzed emotion AI patent applications (N=58) filed in the U.S. concerned with monitoring and detecting emotions and/or mental health. We examined the described technologies' imagined uses and the problems they were positioned to address. We found that inventors justified emotion AI inventions as solutions to issues surrounding data accuracy, care provision and experience, patient-provider communication, emotion regulation, and preventing harms attributed to mental health causes. We then applied an ethical speculation lens to anticipate the potential implications of the promissory emotion AI-enabled futures described in patent applications. We argue that such a future is one filled with mental health conditions' (or 'non-expected' emotions') stigmatization, equating mental health with propensity for crime, and lack of data subjects' agency. By framing individuals with mental health conditions as unpredictable and not capable of exercising their own agency, emotion AI mental health patent applications propose solutions that intervene in this imagined future: intensive surveillance, an emphasis on individual responsibility over structural barriers, and decontextualized behavioral change interventions. Using ethical speculation, we articulate the consequences of these discourses, raising questions about the role of emotion AI as positive, inherent, or inevitable in health and care-related contexts. We discuss our findings' implications for patent review processes, and advocate for policy makers, researchers and technologists to refer to patent (applications) to access, evaluate and (re)consider potentially harmful sociotechnical imaginaries before they become our reality.