Emotion Recognition on the Go: Providing Personalized Services Based on Emotional States

Personalized products and services are the basic need to attract more customers and to gain a competitive advantage as most of the products available in the market place are similar in technical characteristics, quality, and price. Currently, most of the products and services don’t consider the emotional state of the users before offering personalized services which is a big drawback. User emotional state acts as an important context in perception and decision making, and hence should be taken into consideration for offering personalized services. This applies particularly in mobile scenarios, during which people rapidly change places and environments and hence experience rapid changes of emotionally stimulating situations. Adaption to this rapid change of the emotional state promises to be an efficient way to offer personalized emotion-aware services. This paper reports about an ongoing project investigating the possibility of providing personalized services based on the emotional state of users. The model described in the paper uses emotion-related bio-data and physical activity as input to determine the likely emotional state of the user. Based on the computed emotional state, the model chooses an appropriate personalized service to provide. In order to evaluate the model, an experimental prototype is developed. Successful development and test of the model shows that emotional states can be determined with mobile technology and effectively utilized to offer better personalized products and services. The model can further lead to the possibility of developing emotionally intelligent interactive systems.