'Emotion Sense' App Reveals Users' Moods

A team of researchers from Cambridge University have developed a smartphone app called 'Emotion Sense', which collects data from a user's mobile phone in order to understand what triggers their mood swings.

The new Android app uses sensors on a user's phone to collect information about where they are, how noisy their environment is, how much they are moving around, and who they are communicating with.

A user will initially report on their mood through an on-screen matrix designed by psychologists called an 'emotion grid', which has two axes - one stretching from 'negative' to 'positive' feelings, and the other from 'active' to 'inactive'. Using their touchscreen, the user then chooses the point on the grid that reflects how positive and active they feel.

Based on their response, they are then asked to complete a short survey about their mood at different times of the day, and this feedback is then combined with data gathered from the sensors contained within the app.

The app's designers hope that cross-referencing the data sets will deliver a precise record of what drives people's emotional peaks, showing, for example, when they are likely to be at their most stressed, or when they feel most relaxed.

Dr Jason Rentfrow, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, explains: 'Most other attempts at software like this are coarse-grained in terms of their view of what a feeling is, and many just look at emotion in terms of feeling happy, sad, angry or neutral. The aim here is to use a more flexible approach, to collect data that shows how moods vary between people. That is something which we think is quite unique to the system we have designed.'

Web site: www.emotionsense.org .