SmileTracker

This paper presents a system prototype designed to capture naturally occurring instances of positive emotion during the course of normal interaction with a computer. A facial expression recognition algorithm is applied to images captured with the user's webcam. When the user smiles, both a phot...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Picard, Rosalind W., Jaques, Natasha Mary, Chen, Weixuan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109047
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5661-0022
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8413-9469
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9550-2553
Description
Summary:This paper presents a system prototype designed to capture naturally occurring instances of positive emotion during the course of normal interaction with a computer. A facial expression recognition algorithm is applied to images captured with the user's webcam. When the user smiles, both a photo and a screenshot are recorded and saved to the user's profile for later review. Based on positive psychology research, we hypothesize that the act of reviewing content that led to smiles will improve positive affect, and consequently, overall wellbeing. We conducted a preliminary user study to test this hypothesis, as well as to gather feedback on the initial design.