Decoding Emotional Valence from Wearables: Can Our Data Reveal Our True Feelings?

Automatic detection and tracking of emotional states could be beneficial for individuals with various mental health conditions, helping them better understand their symptoms and manage their emotional well-being [7]. This could potentially lead to earlier interventions and more personalized treatment plans tailored to the individual's needs [8]. However, current mobile well-being interventions often rely on self-reported data from users to monitor their emotional states. While this approach can be useful, it can be burdensome for the user, and the data obtained may lack consistency [5]. An alternative approach is to pair mobile applications with wearable devices for automated tracking of physiological states, which can reduce the effort required from users and provide more objective and consistent data. Efforts have been made to detect emotional states using physiological signals captured by wearable devices. Significant progress has been made in laboratory conditions [4, 14] and settings designed to resemble natural conditions [6]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.