Emotion Recognition in Dementia: Advancing technology for multimodal analysis of emotion expression in everyday life

This paper provides an overview of my PhD project that focuses on recognizing emotions in dementia by analyzing multi-modal expressions in autobiographical memories of older adults with dementia. The project aims for a better understanding how dementia influences emotional expressions and how dementia differs from the normal aging process. For this reason, spontaneous emotions will be elicited in autobiographical memories in two groups of older adults, one with dementia the other without, for comparison. Audio, video and physiological data will be collected at their home resulting in real-life environments. The emotional expressions can then be analyzed by extracting verbal, non-verbal, facial and gestural features from the audio, video and physiological data collected. In addition, a longitudinal study will be conducted with the older adults with dementia to investigate the longitudinal effect of dementia on emotions. A database of the emotional memories of these vulnerable groups will then be developed to contribute to the advancement of technologies for (automatic) multi-modal emotion recognition. The database will then be made available for the research community. Lastly, we will also develop visualization and statistical models to assess multi-modal patterns of emotion expression in these groups.