Emotion Classification with Wearables

 Emotion Classification with Wearables

I. Introduction

                The importance of emotions and related psychological processes is immeasurable in terms of the effect it has on the daily lives of people. The topic of emotions used to be the prerogative of many spheres of human activity like philosophy or religion. Only during the last two centuries, with the emergence of psychology, this notion has become the subject of scientific research. Even when the changing character of psychology as a scientific discipline is taken into account, it can be said that researchers in this area of studies have made the most notable progress in understanding human emotions. With the rapid development of technologies, it became possible to bring objective and accurate measurement methods for registration of the events that used to be studied exclusively using the phenomenological approach. While some simple ways of detecting the change in the emotional state have in use for more than a hundred years, only the recent achievements in computer science, machine learning, and engineering made it possible for researchers to look deeper into the mechanisms of emotional processes.

            While the topic became a subject of significant scientific interest, the area of knowledge on how emotional processing occurs comprises a number of valuable practical applications of the information mentioned. Currently, the popular demand for being aware of one’s emotions stems from psychological counseling, self-help and personal growth industry, supportive medicine, and many other fields. The main issue related to fulfilling the demand is connected to limitations that exist in the domain of technical provision of the emotion registration process. Emotions, just like any other phenomena of psychology, are generated by the brain. Researchers use expensive equipment to study the neural processes. However, such devices are few and mostly available to either large research facilities or clinics. In this way, the portable, wearable, and low-cost products are supposed to be the solution.

However, brain activity is extremely complex, and it is hard to register the needed information using the limited capacities of the devices available. Those obstacles are imposed by the necessities of equipment to have good usability and user-friendliness. In order to address the issues outlined above, there was an attempt to create the neuropsychological and mathematical framework for the future device that would combine the accuracy of the medical-tier equipment with the availability and accessibility of the smartphone. To achieve this goal, the given work will present the new method for emotion classification that has the potential of being incorporated into affordable wearable devices for everyday use. This includes the assessment of the parameters related to heart functioning combined with the methods of machine learning. In this way, it would be possible to create a simple device that can tell valuable information on one’s emotional condition. While not having a need for conducting a complicated process of brain scanning or similar procedures, the wearable with a function of tracking and analyzing the information on heartbeat can still serve as a valid tool for an indication of emotion. Naturally, it would not be possible to make a distinction between the complex emotions like grief or spleen, its valence and relevance can be shown with a significant measure of accuracy.

II. Related Work

Before beginning any work on the emotion registration, recognition, or classification, it is necessary to have proper methodological guidance in the subject. As many other subfields of psychological science, the psychology of affective states is multifaceted and represented by the numerous theoretical approaches to the explanation of the subject. There is still a debate in the professional literature regarding the question of whether emotions are universal in all cultures or not. The opponents of the universalist position argue for the numerous differences in the cultural norms of expressing oneself. Also, they often present an argument that the specific name behind a certain perceived emotional state may be unique for a given cultural context and not have any word analogs in other languages. However, as the present work is explicitly aimed at creating a product that can register emotions, it is necessary to have a theoretical basis that at least recognizes a certain measure of similarity in the way human brain runs the related processes. For these purposes, it was decided to adhere to theoretical models that focus on finding the common neuropsychological and physiological basis for the emotion-related events regardless of their name as the classification is based not on the linguistic differentiation, but the observed objective processes in a human body.

It is still difficult to say exactly what an emotional reaction is; some scientists argue that