mFeel: Mobile Affective System
A ffective computing relates to how computers recognize and respond to human emotion. Although this field remains fairly undeveloped, sensor technology is improving rapidly in terms of accuracy, usability, and cost.
It’s now possible to connect biological sensors to computers, and mobile sensing is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life with the mobile phone’s rapid evolution into a powerful sensing platform.
At King Saud University, we’re investigating how mobile phones can recognize, interpret, and express human emotion. We’re also looking into how we can better understand a person’s emotional experience in a particular environment or in response to a particular service.
Emotions are personal, but they can be shared among groups, just as a person walking down a street might always experience the same emotion near a certain place.
The mFeel mobile system combines context awareness with affective and cognitive techniques to sense and react based on the user’s biological state and surroundings. mFeel will enable various human-emotion scenarios through a primary “collective emotion” service
(where the focus is more on the place than individual) and an “individual emotion” service.
We’ll provide users with biological sensors—such as galvanic skin conductors(GSRs), electroencephalograms(EEGs), and temperature and heart-rate monitors—to collect hundreds of emotional traces around a city. We’ll then correlate the collected emotional data with environmental data coming from pollution sensors, noise meters, and weather and traffic reports. Accumulating these digital footprints will provide a new opportunity to study human behaviors—that is, by collecting emotion data, along with data about pollution, noise, and weather, we’ll be able to understand why a user is experiencing a particular emotion. The user can also annotate the data on the go with photos and tags for real-time online analysis.
We envision applying the mFeel system to personal-wellbeing and emotion psychology applications as well as using it to improve urban and municipality design and management. Currently, we’re carrying out some empirical user studies with an initial prototype that lets users tag their feelings and mood as they move around the city (see Figure 1).
Once we complete these tests, we’ll work on another set of experiments to collect sensor data from the fully developed prototype (currently at the proof of- concept stage).
A mobile affective system will help capture stressful and serene moments, as well as moments of concentration and focus. It will also provide better insight into negative and positive events and will give users the ability to record their sentiment immediately or at later time. The focus will be mainly on user reactions to the environment.
You could read the above description in Arabic mFeel in Arabic here: http://rs.ksu.edu.sa/83481.html
Team members
Luluah Alhusain, PhD candidate
Nouf Alajmi, MS candidate
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