Abstract—clinically, finger tip temperature (FTT) has been used as a sensitive index to monitor if a person is relaxed or not. When a person is relaxed, his/her vessels will be dilated and finger tip will be warmer. If one is anxious or tense, the vessels will be constricted and finger tip will be cool. FTT is a method of bio-feedback to tell the patient if he/she is in a relaxed condition. The subjects experiencing emotion in a higher magnitude differ from those who can regulate the emotions and such a factor is termed as emotional intelligence. In this paper, the subject whose FTT is to be measured is shown a video clipping or photographs or recorded audio signals are played. The subject, upon the influence of these, will respond and emotions are evoked. The change in FTT due to this evoked emotion is recorded for a finite interval of time and then analyzed. In this work, a total of 75 subjects are chosen. During selection of subjects, enough care is taken to include persons from different age groups, gender and social background. The data corresponding to FTT is acquired and processed using National Instrument’s LabVIEW software and hardware tools. The results obtained are encouraging with high level of accuracy and repeatability. Since, the subjects also give feedback about the emotion experienced, the obtained results are validated.

Index Terms—Emotion, lab view, stimulus, TDM

The authors are with the Department of Instrumentation at Malnad College of Engineering, Hassan, India.

Cite: G. Shivakumar and P. A. Vijaya, "Emotion Recognition Using Finger Tip Temperature: First Step towards an Automatic System," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 252-255, 2012.