The last few decades have propelled the world into a direction like no other. With life changing technology being introduced to us so frequently it is hard to keep up with the technological trends and advances that are being produced. One trend that we are beginning to see take a rise is emotional artificial intelligence, or affective computing. Emotional artificial intelligence is different from your run of the mill artificial intelligence because it has the ability to understand humans emotions. Emotion AI utilizes, “affective computing and artificial intelligence techniques to sense, learn about and interact with human emotional life”. Through these advances machines are on the trajectory to be able to interpret users emotional state through text, audio, and video. In doing so systems that have the capability to utilize emotional artificial intelligence will comb through this data such as, facial expressions, tone of voice, and emit an appropriate response to the users’ emotions. Some techniques that are currently being used to sense people’s emotional states through software are sentiment analysis, facial coding, eye tracking, and wearables. Each of these techniques helps software’s better understand what a person may be trying to emote. Through sentiment analysis these devices are able to scan through users’ online language in order to interpret emotions, combing through emojis, images and video for signals. Facial coding and eye-tracking are similar in nature, facial coding of expressions analyses faces from cameras in order to “infer” an emotion. While eye tracking analyses things such as gaze and eye movements. Wearables such as Apple Watches can be used to detect emotions through the measurement of heart rate to infer someone’s emotions. Emotion AI has not been completely rolled out yet, but it has the potential to be a huge disruptor in our lives.

As we look towards some existing trends already, we can see how impactful this type of technology can be. So far, we have looks at emotion AI being used in the medical field in the form of “nurse bots”. These bots serve as assistants to doctors taking temperatures and measuring pulses, in order to help with diagnosis and treatment. Not only do they serve as assistants to physicians, but they also serve as companions for patients. They check in on patients ensuring they have taken their medication and check on their general wellbeing. This is just the start of emotion AI being used in the medical field. In the future we are looking at trends towards emotion AI being used to detect and diagnose mental health disorders, free up doctor’s times by completing patient record analysis to help make informed diagnosis on patients, while also allowing doctors to spend more time with patients. Emotion AI will be something that changes the way in which the medical world operates largely. However, it is not the only sector that will be disrupted another place we can see affective computing being implemented is education.

Education is an important part of our lives, and while for some learning new things comes easy there is a large percentage of people who have difficulty. Those who struggle with learning often fall through the cracks of the school system. However, emotion AI has the potential to change the way in which we learn. There are programs that are already implemented that help cater learning to an individual needs. The computer software 4 Little Trees uses emotion recognition AI to “measure muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear”. Through the monitoring of student’s emotions while studying and answering problems, as well as collecting how long it takes to answer questions and performance history the software is able to make predictions about the student. 4 Little Trees takes the data is collects in order to “generate reports on their strength weaknesses and motivation levels; and forecast their grades”. This type of technology has the power to help predict what students may need extra help before it is too late in order for teachers and parents to get these students the help they need. Education can be revolutionized if this technology is implemented into schools. While emotions are being monitored by educators to help students, our emotions are also on the trajectory to be monitored by corporations in order to improve marketing.

Our emotions have a large influence over our behaviors, so what happens when companies are able to analyze our emotions? The future of marketing is emotional AI driven and a company called Affectiva is proving that. Using customers consent Affectiva “uses emotion AI technology to capture macro and micro facial reactions to an advertisement”. In doing so the company is able to figure out what consumers are feeling towards their advertisements in order to know if they will make a purchase. This type of technology has the potential for companies to create ads that are even more catered to their consumers and desired audience. However, this is not where we see the use of emotionally driven technology ending. As companies begin to recognize the importance of the data of consumers emotions, we are going to begin seeing surveillance technology in places such as department stores. In the future we will begin to see how companies will monitor shoppers emotions to “understand how shoppers really feel about what they are buying”. This will give companies the power to understand consumers reactions to things such a pricing, or perhaps pricing. This type of data can change the consumer world more in favor of these big companies because they will have the power to use our emotions to help them gain more capital. Once again showing how emotional artificial intelligence has the power to change the world we live in.