Shopping for emotion - Evaluating the usefulness of emotion recognition data from a retail perspective

This study researches the usefulness of emotion recognition technology and respective data within the retail space. Emotion recognition is a relatively novel technology that promises to pinpoint a subjects emotional state. While the use cases could be many for a retailer there is still little available research on how to implement these tools and how to interpret their data. This study aims to provide an answer to those questions by reviewing current studies in emotion recognition and by setting up a rudimentary field test to compare data gathered by the Microsoft Emotion Recognition service with standard user satisfaction measurements. The responses are examined to determine if a subjects’ identified emotion has any connection to their perceived satisfaction with an experience. No such connection is found within the gathered data however, but several other points of interest are discovered. The study concludes that current emotion recognition tools may not live up to their hype and offer little in terms of useful data. They tend to require exaggerated emotional expressions and perform subpar to humans in many cases. The reasons for this, and possible improvements to these tools are also discussed