Modernizing the Roman Thumbs-up-or-down Decision

This patent describes (among other things) an automated way to perform the Roman Emperor’s decision (indicated in the old days — reputedly — by a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down signal, displayed by the emperor) as to whether a gladiator should live or die:

“Monitoring of crowd response to performances,” US patent #6885304, issued Apr 26, 2005 to David Trevor Cliff and Timothy Alan Heath Wilkinson, is for ” Monitoring apparatus and methods for monitoring the reaction of people to a performance use two or more monitoring devices of different types. Output signals from the monitoring devices are combined to produce at least one crowd reaction signal indicative of the reaction of those people to the performance.”

Detail from the patent: