Facial Emotion Recognition and the Future of Work

This article provides an overview of the emergent area of facial emotion recognition (FER). Increasingly, videoconferencing applications are being used to bridge the geographic divide, as telecommuters have opted to work remotely (e.g. from home) during the COVID-19 pandemic. organizations have established business continuity programs that want to ensure that their remote workers are maintaining their health and well-being. As a result, some videoconferencing software can now perform FER, providing feedback to supervisors about how well their workforce is coping during these unprecedented times. What might such technologies mean for how people present in front of the camera? And how do these systems work? The significance of this paper is in presenting an end-to-end technological description of FER systems in the context of a “future of work” use case scenario presenting a working prototype developed by the authors and available on GitHub. The concepts of fairness and algorithmic bias in context is considered, before proceeding to address some of the human and social dimensions of these systems.