Towards Real-Time Multimodal Emotion Recognition among Couples

Researchers are interested in understanding the emotions of couples as it relates to relationship quality and dyadic management of chronic diseases. Currently, the process of assessing emotions is manual, time-intensive, and costly. Despite the existence of works on emotion recognition among couples, there exists no ubiquitous system that recognizes the emotions of couples in everyday life while addressing the complexity of dyadic interactions such as turn-taking in couples' conversations. In this work, we seek to develop a smartwatch-based system that leverages multimodal sensor data to recognize each partner's emotions in daily life. We are collecting data from couples in the lab and in the field and we plan to use the data to develop multimodal machine learning models for emotion recognition. Then, we plan to implement the best models in a smartwatch app and evaluate its performance in real-time and everyday life through another field study. Such a system could enable research both in the lab (e.g. couple therapy) or in daily life (assessment of chronic disease management or relationship quality) and enable interventions to improve the emotional well-being, relationship quality, and chronic disease management of couples.