Emotion Monitoring Closer than you Think.
Imagine a world where our emotions are analyzed and responded to constantly. Recent developments from Affectiva are placing us one step closer to such a world. Their products, the Q Sensor and Affdex, measure our physical responses through a wrist worn biosensor or facial recognition software.
"Pretty much all communication, all of our experience has emotion," Says MIT professor Rosalind Picard, Affectiva’s co-founder. "Most people think technology doesn't need emotion, but it does need to show respect for people's feelings. And you can't really show respect for people's feelings unless you can see people's feelings."
The Affectiva web page advertises that the system is helpful for therapy sessions, classrooms, and market research. Their current demo analyzes emotional responses to Super Bowl ads.
The applications of this technology could revolutionize the advertising industry. Already online advertising allows marketers to target particular demographics, and with this technology it could become possible to target the moods you have found most likely to purchase. This technology has the potential to expand and improve to enable department stores to recognize a persons mood who walks in to their store and advertise accordingly.
"Marketers recognize that emotion drives brand loyalty and purchase decisions." says Affdex webpage, "This ongoing investment in research and development is focused not just on measuring, but also on predicting which ads will really work to drive sales and build brands."
The amount of data collected using emotional monitoring systems could be huge. It could include data about what a person likes to do, when they likes to do it, how it make them feel. The statistical data collected on emotions could inform a car dealership when is the best time to call offering an upgrade, or a bank to offer a new credit card.
Already Affectiva has been testing this information gathering technique, sending out around 50 biosensor clad shoppers in major cities across the US for a study conducted by the Interpublic Group of Companies Shopper Sciences Unit. The study was conducted to find out what causes reactions in shoppers and spikes their emotional responses.
It will be interesting to watch this new technology over the next few years. The ability to capture emotional data from an individual is something that currently is not being done, and the implementation of Affectiva's technology into the data collecting field could open up a whole new range of data for analysis in the business intelligence and data science world.
For more data and analytics-related articles like this one, you should follow us on Twitter.
Or provide your email address below for free exclusive reports and commentary.
Book Promo
Secrets of the Big Data Revolution
Real-world success stories and roadmaps to get you there.
Commentary
The CIA admits to monitoring Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but the tools they’re using might be enough to get you to rethink posting anything personal or ever checking in...
This report is big business, it's important to remember it drives 100's of millions in corporate Business Intelligence(BI) spending, and has a hidden side to it. Although Gartner stays well away from saying it, there is a definite favorability for products from companies Gartner does business with. A quick look on Quora shows you exactly what that looks like: more time with business partners products and loosening of rules for inclusion.
You know about Big Data and its potential, how it creates greater understanding of our world, reduces waste and misuse of resources, and dramatically increases efficiency. The level of information available is growing like never before, and hiding in all that data are the insights, ideas, and explanations needed to reach that promised potential; it’s just waiting to be discovered, and there’s the problem.