Behavioral Biometrics in Assisted Living: A Methodology for Emotion Recognition

Behavioral biometrics aim at providing algorithms for the automatic recognition of individual behavioral traits, stemming from a person’s actions, attitude, expressions and conduct. In the field of ambient assisted living, behavioral biometrics find an important niche. Individuals suffering from the early stages of neurodegenerative diseases (MCI, Alzheimer’s, dementia) need supervision in their daily activities. In this context, an unobtrusive system to monitor subjects and alert formal and informal carers providing information on both physical and emotional status is of great importance and positively affects multiple stakeholders. The primary aim of this paper is to describe a methodology for recognizing the emotional status of a subject using facial expressions and to identify its uses, in conjunction with pre-existing risk-assessment methodologies, for its integration into the context of a smart monitoring system for subjects suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. Paul Ekman’s research provided the background on the universality of facial expressions as indicators of underlying emotions. The methodology then makes use of computational geometry, image processing and graph theory algorithms for the detection of regions of interest and then a neural network is used for the final classification. Findings are coupled with previous published work for risk assessment and alert generation in the context of an ambient assisted living environment based on Service oriented architecture principles, aimed at remote web-based estimation of the cognitive and physical status of MCI and dementia patients.