Emotion Capture among Real Couples in Everyday Life

Illness management among married adults is mainly shared with their spouses and it involves social support. Social support among couples has been shown to affect emotional well-being positively or negatively and result in healthier habits among diabetes patients. Hence, through automatic emotion recognition, we could have an assessment of the emotional well-being of couples which could inform the development and triggering of interventions to help couples better manage chronic diseases. We are developing an emotion recognition system to recognize the emotions of real couples in everyday life and in this paper, we describe our approach to collecting sensor and self-report emotion data among Swiss-based German-speaking couples in everyday life. We also discuss various aspects of the study such as our novel approach of triggering data collection based on detecting that the partners are close and speaking, the self-reports and multimodal data as well as privacy concerns with our method.