“Are You Okay, Honey?”: Recognizing Emotions Among Couples Managing Diabetes in Daily Life Using Multimodal Real-World Smartwatch Data
Journal
Sensors
Type
Article
Date Issued
2026-05-15
Author(s)
Boateng, George
;
Zhao, Xiangyu
;
Speichert, Malgorzata
;
;
Lüscher, Janina
;
Pauly, Theresa
;
Scholz, Urte
;
Bodenmann, Guy
;
Abstract
Couples generally manage chronic diseases together and the management takes an emotional toll on both patients and their romantic partners. Consequently, recognizing the emotions of each partner in daily life could provide insight into their emotional well-being in chronic disease management. Currently, the process of assessing each partner’s emotions is manual, time-intensive, and costly. Despite the existence of works on emotion recognition among couples, none of these works have used data collected from couples’ interactions in daily life. In this work, we collected 85 h (1021 5-min samples) of real-world multimodal smartwatch sensor data (speech, heart rate, accelerometer, and gyroscope) and self-reported emotion data (n = 612) from 26 partners (13 couples) managing diabetes mellitus type 2 in daily life. We extracted physiological, movement, acoustic, and linguistic features, and trained machine learning models (support vector machine and random forest) to recognize each partner’s self-reported emotions (valence and arousal). Our results from the best models—balanced accuracies of 63.8% and 78.1% for arousal and valence respectively—are better than the results from (1) chance, (2) prior work that also used data from German-speaking, Swiss-based couples, and (3) partners’ perceptions of each other’s emotions. This work contributes toward building automated emotion recognition systems that would eventually enable partners to monitor their emotions in daily life and enable the delivery of interventions to improve their emotional well-being.
HSG Classification
contribution to practical use / society
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
26
Number
10
Subject(s)