Waltham, Massachusetts-based emotions analytics company Affectiva has launched a new offering, called Emotion as a Service, that allows organizations to track the emotions of people interacting with their digital product or service. Affectiva also released an updated version of its emotion-sensing SDK.
Affdex Emotion as a Service can be used by designers and developers who don't want to invest in developing a platform and integrating Affectiva's SDK into it, but instead want to access emotion data from videos through a cloud-based offering. Affectiva VP of Product Strategy and Marketing Gabi Zijderveld told MobiHealthNews this offering is designed for people developing online programs, instead of people developing an app for mobile devices.
"For the first time ever, with Affdex Emotion as a Service, we are making emotion data very accessible by providing easy and inexpensive analysis of human emotions: video in, emotion analytics out," Affectiva cofounder Rana el Kaliouby said in a statement. "Powered with unique emotion data, designers, developers and researchers can truly bring emotional intelligence to the digital world."
In recent years Affectiva has been much more focused on marketing and the advertising industry than healthcare, which it had focused on early on in its development. With this recent announcement Affectiva mentioned healthcare organizations as a target customer group.
In late 2011, Affectiva launched an emotional arousal wearable called the Q-sensor, based on its cofounder Rosalind Picard’s research with children with epilepsy at Boston Children’s Hospital. But in April 2013, Affectiva discontinued the Q-sensor and refocused the company on emotional analysis for advertising focus groups. Picard then joined another company, Empatica, focused on creating a wearable similar to the Q-sensor. At the time, Affectiva explained that Affdex was not a healthcare product, but instead targets its offering at advertisers, who could use expression analysis as part of next generation focus groups.
Zijderveld explained that since then, the technology they offer has evolved, market awareness for emotion-tracking offerings has grown, and the new ways the company packages their product -- to make it more accessible -- has allowed Affectiva to refocus on healthcare.
One of the big use cases for Affectiva's technology in healthcare is for academic research, including studies on autism, depression, nutrition, mental wellbeing, mood, stress, and anger management. Zijderveld also said companies are interested in using Affectiva's products for remote health monitoring, like measuring mood over time.
Last year, Affectiva disclosed some of its financial information on Inc Magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies for the year prior. The company reported that its revenues for 2013 were $5 million and that the company’s revenue had grown 4,676 percent from its 2010 revenue, which was $105,050.
