Explorer Project Continuous Real-Time Monitoring

The unparalleled technological progress of mobile phones, which became smartphones, advanced real-life, real-time methods in psychological science. These methods come with four main promises:

1. the collection of data in the real-world, which increases the ecological validity of results,
2. the assessment of individuals' momentary states, which minimizes recall biases,
3. the possibility of continuous assessments of fluctuating variables, which enables
4. real-time analyses to provide personalized, just-in-time feedback.

The current projects aims at advancing mobile sensing of social interactions and emotions that also protects the privacy of people. As a first step, we examine algorithms for speaker detection and speaker separation in social situations. The second step involves the development of algorithms that analyze the emotional valence of social interactions and the speaking persons. Here we use data of couple’s interactions in their private home. Future work will include using the automatically detected and classified information about people’s social interactions and emotional valence of interactions for context-triggered e-diaries and just-in-time mobile interventions. Looking at the “better data – better action – better policy” pipeline, we see tremendous potential for improvement through real-time action and policies in times of greatest needs.

Status: 2nd Quarter of 2022