SOONER or later it had to happen. I’m referring to new ‘appiness’ technology developed to monitor our daily sense of wellbeing. There are apps for everything else, it seems, so why not one for measuring a person’s happiness?

The ‘perception of mood’ system developed by Cambridge University researchers is known as EmotionSense, a name which immediately begs the question: how come there’s no space where a space should be? What’s wrong with Emotion Sense?

Lots of Clever Dick marketing types think up these sorts of titles which join proper names and words or use lower case first letters as exemplified by the infuriating ‘lakes leisure’ used to officially describe Kendal’s flagship recreation centre.

I get so annoyed by such liberties taken with our language, I’m probably the type of candidate the designers of this new-fangled approach to mood monitoring had in mind.

The system uses smartphones (here we go again, no space) to collect information about where users are, how noisy or uncomfortable the environ-ment is and with whom they are communicating. It then combines this data with how the user describes his or her own mood.

While it all sounds rather silly, there’s supposed to be a serious purpose, which is to see how mobile phones can be used to improve health and wellbeing by helping to determine what types of situations get us stressed.

To me, the whole concept is fundamentally flawed. Mobile telephones ARE the stress causers. People’s moods are obviously going to be adversely affected if glued to their lug holes (note the space) there’s an electronic device with the propensity to relay a stream of bad news - like you’ve been dumped by your boyfriend/girlfriend; the 10-1 cert you’ve wagered £100 on at Epsom has fallen at the first bend; or you’ve just been sacked by a text message from your boss.