Natasha Jaques, Weixuan 'Vincent' Chen, and Rosalind W. Picard. 2015. SmileTracker: Automatically and Unobtrusively Recording Smiles and their Context. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1953–1958. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732708

Abstract

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.