Feelings by Phone

A system which enables psychologists to track people’s emotional behaviour through their mobile phones has been successfully road-tested by researchers. ‘EmotionSense’ uses speech-recognition software and phone sensors in standard smart phones to assess how people's emotions are influenced by factors such as their surroundings, the time of day, or their relationships with others. It was developed by a University of Cambridge-led team of academics, including both psychologists and computer scientists. They will report the first successful trial of the system today at the Association for Computing Machinery's conference on Ubiquitous Computing in Copenhagen. Early results suggest that the technology could provide psychologists with a much deeper insight into how our emotional peaks - such as periods of happiness, anger or stress - are related to where we are, what we are doing or who we are with. EmotionSense uses the recording devices which already exist in many mobile phones to analyse audio samples of the user speaking.

The samples are compared with an existing speech library (known as the ‘Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Library’) which is widely used in emotion and speech processing research. The library consists of actors reading a series of dates and numbers in tones representing 14 different emotional categories. From here, the samples are grouped into five broader categories - "Happy" emotions (such as elation, or interest); "Sadness"; "Fear", "Anger" (which includes related emotions such as disgust) and "Neutral" emotions (such as boredom or passivity. The data can then be compared with other information which is also picked up by the phone. Built-in GPS software enables researchers to cross-refer the audio samples with the user's location, Bluetooth technology can be used to identify who they were with and the phone also records data about who they were talking to and at what time the conversation took place. The software is also set up so that the analysis is carried out on the phone itself. This means that data does not need to be transmitted elsewhere and can be discarded post-analysis with ease to maintain user privacy.

More information:

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2010092804