Abstract
Automated Emotion Recognition (AER) is the process of programatically
identifying and classifying affective responses to stimuli through the
analysis of physiological signals. AER has applications in interpersonal
communications via digital mediums, human-computer interactions,
third-party monitoring and surveillance, personal health and wellness,
and in physical and mental health treatment settings. Prior work largely
relies on equipment that is most easily used in a laboratory
environment. Wearable physiological sensors are now commonly found in
smartwatches and fitness bands, opening the door to applications of AER
in everyday life. In this paper, we demonstrate automated emotion
recognition (AER) using deep learning with convolution neural networks
(CNN) for automated feature extraction from ECG signals obtained using
commercially available wearable ECG sensors. We utilize a novel approach
to automated feature extraction relying on temporal CNN to resolve the
time-dependent nature of the biomedical signal data. We achieve 96.2%
accuracy in classifying emotional responses into the appropriate
quadrant of the arousal / valence space.