Emotion monitoring with RFID: an experimental study

Emotion recognition can be helpful in many fields such as elderly healthcare. Existing emotion recognition approaches are usually based on wearable sensors or computer vision analysis, which are intrusive or inconvenient to use. In recent years, radio frequency identification (RFID) has been exploited to monitor physiological signs (e.g., respiration and heartbeat) of users in a contactless and convenient way. Motivated by such progresses, we conduct an experimental study on recognizing the emotion of users with commercial RFID devices. We propose Free-EQ, an emotion recognition framework which first extracts respiration-based features and heartbeat-based features from RFID signals and then uses these features to train a classifier to recognize different emotions of a target user. Experiments on commercial RFID hardware show that Free-EQ can distinguish different emotions with relatively high accuracy.