Towards estimation of emotions from eye pupillometry with low-cost devices

Abstract

Emotional care is important for some patients and their caregivers. Within a clinical or home care situation, technology can be employed to remotely monitor the emotional response of such people. This paper considers pupillometry as a non-invasive way of classifying an individual’s emotions. Standardized audio signals were used to emotionally stimulate the test subjects. Eye pupil images of up to 32 subjects of different genders were captured as video images by low-cost, infrared, Raspberry Pi board cameras. By processing of the images, a dataset of pupil diameters according to gender and age characteristics was established. Appropriate statistical tests for inference of the emotional state were applied to that dataset to establish the subjects’ emotional states in response to the audio stimuli. Results showed agreement between the test subjects’ opinions of their emotional state and the classification of emotions according to the range of pupil diameters found using the described method.