Can Eye Gaze Improve Emotional State Detection on Off the Shelf Smart Devices

Smartphones and wearable technology have revolutionized digital healthcare through the use of rich sensor data. Digital phenotyping, a field that uses smartphone data to detect or recognize cognitive, behavioral, or affective states and traits, is often based on data from sensors (such as inertial or touch sensors), activity or user logs, and user-generated content. In this paper, we propose the use of eye gaze as a new digital biomarker for affect detection, leveraging the advanced capabilities of off-the-shelf smart devices. We designed two studies in the Instagram use scenario to detect emotional state change using gaze data. The first study took place in a controlled setting and help us understand the value of gaze features for affect detection. In this study, we achieved a peak accuracy of 76.4% for binary valence detection. The second study will be conducted over a longer period in real-world settings, with a larger population, to assess the effectiveness of our approach. By including this new sensing modality in affective digital phenotyping, we plan to improve the reliability and robustness of emotional state detection.