Cecilia Mascolo has been part of a team at University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory exploring mobile phones as ’sensors’ that can monitor how the user’s emotions change according to their location, surroundings, relationships or the time. EmotionSense integrates information gathered through different features of the mobile phone, location through GPS, movement through the accelerometer, proximity to bluetooth devices as well as excerpts of conversations and to create an impression of how someone is feeling.
Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Library: There is an audio sample library, named as: ‘Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Library’ representing 14 categories of emotions. Excerpts from conversations are compared to this library and then overlaid with data on location and so on, illustrating trigger points for stress or mood at home or work, in crowds or alone and at different times of day. Dr Mascolo who is working with fellow computer scientists and psychologists, is keen to emphasise that EmotionSense does not monitor mobile phone calls, but excerpts of real-world conversations that are deleted as soon as the analysis is completed.
Tool for Psychological Studies: “This is not a tool for spying, but a very specific development for psychological research” said Mascolo. She thinks of mobile phones as the most definitive, ubiquitous personal device that we carry, can give unique insights into our state of mind. “This is very significant because mobile phones are carried by people continuously and they forget who forget [about being surveyed], so new psychological studies can happen over long time scales and with large samples – something they are not yet able to do.” “We are trying to make the technology safe when keeping all the data in the phone,” she said.
Two Phases of Development: This research is still in its initial stages. Phase one used a small research group of 18 volunteers, using Nokia 6210 Navigator mobile phones running EmotionSense software, over a 10-day period. While, the second phase of development will focus on making the programme more energy efficient and exploring how additional features of the mobile phone could be used to expand the tool. “The point is where is this technology going, how can we make it safe, secure and unobtrusive,” said Mascolo.
Successful Trial: The research team was working to refine the system further by improving its emotion classification and its response to background noise. The successful trial will be detailed on Wednesday to the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference in Copenhagen.
Initial Results of EmotionSense: Results showed that 70% of the EmotionSense results tallied with what the volunteers had reported in a more traditional self-reporting survey. Grouping its analysis into either sadness, fear, anger, neutral or happy, EmotionSense found the home unsurprisingly triggered happy responses in 45% of results while being at work was responsible for 45% of ’sad’ recordings. Evenings prompted more intense emotions and volunteers were less expressive when in larger crowds.
Dr. Jason Rentfrow, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge who also took part in the research, said: “This technology has the potential to transform the ways in which scientists study psychological states and social behaviour. The methods most often used rely on self-reports, which are subject to a number of limitations – people forget certain details and are sometimes inaccurate at reporting how often they engaged in particular tasks. Mobile sensing technology can overcome those limitations, providing unobtrusive and objective information about social behaviours and activities.”
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