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Fraunhofer – Emo-scan: reading emotions from facial expressions in real time

EARTO Innovation Awards 2016 – Impact Delivered Category

  Emotions are spontaneous reactions affecting all of our daily decisions such as the evaluation of products or brands. Analysing emotions has been used in the market research context to evaluate the effectiveness of advertisements. However, existing methods are either highly subjective, time-consuming or very costly.   Innovation: EARTO member Fraunhofer and its partners created an easy-to-use software, based on the Fraunhofer SHORE™ technology, that automatically recognizes and analyzes subtle emotions from facial expressions in real time. The analysis can be carried out with a simple webcam and a computer, which makes it cheaper than alternative methods.   Impact Delivered: The SHORETM technology has been licensed to over 400 customers and generated €2.4 million revenues by 2015. Apart from the advertisement sector, EMO Scan and SHORETM can also be used in other fields like in the automobile sector to analyze drivers’ stress and fatigue, in the health sector to help people with autism read other people’s emotions, or more generally to improve the interactions between humans and machines.  
More information about this innovation
  The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is a German RTO which has a clearly defined mission of application-oriented research, with a focus on key technologies of relevance to the future.   www.fraunhofer.de