Affectiva Launches An SDK To Bring Emotion Tracking To Mobile Apps

Affectiva, an emotion tracking startup with big-name investors, is announcing the launch of its mobile software development kit.

The company says it can analyze a user’s emotions by tracking their facial expressions, and it uses that technology to measure the effectiveness of ads. With the new SDK, mobile developers will be able to add these capabilities to their apps as well.

This means Affectiva’s technology could be embedded into consumer products — Senior Marketing Manager Elina Kanan suggested via email that the possibilities include healthcare, education, and gaming apps. (Moving into the consumer market was one of the stated goals when the company raised a $12 million Series C back in 2012.)

Existing uses of the technology will continue to be the core of the company’s business, Kanan said, “But even our clients (market researchers, brands and media publishers) are making a big push for mobile to better reach and engage their consumers emotionally.”

Affectiva can supposedly use the smartphone camera, video footage, or a single image for its emotion sensing. Kanan added that since the SDK allows processing to take place on the device, rather than in the cloud, apps can “not only capture facial expressions, but also mine the emotion data in real time.” (For privacy purposes, the facial images are not saved or transmitted.)

“This is a relatively new methodology (using automated facial expression tech on mobile), so we’re haven’t amassed the large database of emotion data for mobile, as we have for our main platform (over 1 billion face videos),” Kanan added. “We continuously use this database to iterate and improve our existing facial classifiers, so updating our classifiers and validating them for mobile will take more time as we continue to gather more data.”

The company spun out of the MIT Media Lab and its investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Li Ka-Shing’s Horizon Ventures.

“Mobile is growing exponentially,” Stephanie Tilenius, an executive in residence at Kleiner Perkins said in an email statement. “With social networking and geo-location, our devices are enabled to know who we are, where we are and what we’re doing. However, these smart devices are still missing the key element to understanding human sentiment. As technology innovators, Affectiva is creating a platform for passive and active emotion-sensing — the next generation of social communication.”