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SWEET Crowd Emotion Monitor

Live demo gives real-time feedback on scientific conference Measuring Behavior 2014.

Want to know where the action is at the conference? Interested to get real-time feedback about conference hotspots? Our SWEET crowd emotion monitor was demonstrating just that at the Measuring Behavior conference held on August 27-29 in Wageningen.

What is SWEET?

SWEET is short for Sense & Tweet. It is a software tool that combines state-of-the-art sensing, event processing, reasoning and data communication technologies. SWEET is a Crowd Emotion Monitor, an application that is able to assess the behavior and emotion of groups of people and relay that information to participants in an intuitive way. 

The Goal

The goal of SWEET is to enhance the experience during the conference: Information is collected and fed back to participants, which tells you at which locations there is a lot of activity or where many smiles have been detected.

In a broader sense, the Crowd Emotion Monitor can be used at events where people gather for professional reasons or for entertainment The Crowd Emotion Monitor can also contribute to increasing safety: information that is collected can be used to assess the situation in a crowd. SWEET is being developed in the context of COMMIT/, a Dutch public-private research program in information and communication science. Partners of the consortium are CWI/MonetDB, TNO, University of Twente, VicarVision and Noldus.

How does it work?

The measurement platform uses built-in sensors of smartphones and dedicated Wi-Fi access points. Combining many smartphones and access points makes it possible to measure the locations and behavior of a crowd.

The SWEET app measures:

  • Location: From the ‘fingerprint’ of Wi-Fi access points we determine the location of participants.
  • Emotion : From facial expressions computed from ‘selfies’ or camera pictures from cameras installed at the conference we analyze emotions (all pictures are analyzed using the FaceReader analysis server).
  • Subjective feedback: With an event-driven questionnaire tool we measure how participants are feeling.

The collected information is relayed in a highly intuitive manner and used to give real time feedback to its users, for instance to direct them to the location with the most positive experience. The app shows an ‘emotion map’ of the conference venue, with hotspots visualizing the responses of all participants. People who have not installed the SWEET app can be informed by tweets containing feedback.

SWEET demo

Please join us at our SWEET demonstration during The Big Future of Data event, which is scheduled for Thursday 2 October, from 13h30, Trouw, Amsterdam.

We love to hear your feedback! Please let us know what you think of this tool and its applications and for more information about the SWEET project. Drop us a note at noldusnbd@gmail.com or john.schavemaker@tno.nl.