Augmenting Social Science Research with Multimodal Data Collection: The EZ-MMLA Toolkit

While the majority of social scientists still rely on traditional research instruments (e.g., surveys, self-reports, qualitative observations), multimodal sensing is becoming an emerging methodology for capturing human behaviors. Sensing technology has the potential to complement and enrich traditional measures by providing high frequency data on people’s behavior, cognition and affects. However, there is currently no easy-to-use toolkit for recording multimodal data streams. Existing methodologies rely on the use of physical sensors and custom-written code for accessing sensor data. In this paper, we present the EZ-MMLA toolkit. This toolkit was implemented as a website and provides easy access to multimodal data collection algorithms. One can collect a variety of data modalities: data on users’ attention (eye-tracking), physiological states (heart rate), body posture (skeletal data), gestures (from hand motion), emotions (from facial expressions and speech) and lower-level computer vision algorithms (e.g., fiducial/color tracking). This toolkit can run from any browser and does not require dedicated hardware or programming experience. We compare this toolkit with traditional methods and describe a case study where the EZ-MMLA toolkit was used by aspiring educational researchers in a classroom context. We conclude by discussing future work and other applications of this toolkit, potential limitations and implications.