Wearable-Based Intelligent Emotion Monitoring in Older Adults during Daily Life Activities

Abstract

We present a system designed to monitor the well-being of older adults during their daily activities. To automatically detect and classify their emotional state, we collect physiological data through a wearable medical sensor. Ground truth data are obtained using a simple smartphone app that provides ecological momentary assessment (EMA), a method for repeatedly sampling people’s current experiences in real time in their natural environments. We are making the resulting dataset publicly available as a benchmark for future comparisons and methods. We are evaluating two feature selection methods to improve classification performance and proposing a feature set that augments and contrasts domain expert knowledge based on time-analysis features. The results demonstrate an improvement in classification accuracy when using the proposed feature selection methods. Furthermore, the feature set we present is better suited for predicting emotional states in a leave-one-day-out experimental setup, as it identifies more patterns.