Design of a Multi-Sensor Framework for the Real-time Monitoring of Social Interactions

Modern sensor technologies have been employed to monitor aspects of social interactions, such as human emotions, that are known to influence human health. To reduce the negative impact that some behaviors could have on our health, real-time monitoring of social interactions is desired to bring awareness of human behavior through real-time feedback. Still, the design of systems for the real-time monitoring of social interactions poses considerable challenges that range from multi-sensor integration to signal analysis. Intending to overcome these challenges, this paper presents a study of a variety of sensor modalities and the design of a multi-sensor framework that allows the study and real-time analysis of both in-person and virtual social interaction environments. The framework consists of three multi-sensor nodes and a central unit. Results show validation of the variety of sensor data collected from a single sensor node and behavioral information that can be identified due to data synchronization from multiple sensor nodes.