Automated Emotion Recognition System Using Blood Volume Pulse and XGBoost Learning

Abstract

In this study, a new method for detecting emotions using Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signals and machine learning was presented. The BVP of 30 subjects from the publicly available CASE dataset was pre-processed, and 39 features were extracted from various emotional states, such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The features were categorized into time, frequency, and time-frequency domains and used to build an emotion detection model with XGBoost. The model achieved the highest classification accuracy of 71.88% using the top 10 features. The most significant features of the model were computed from time (5 features), time-frequency (4 features), and frequency (1 feature) domains. The skewness calculated from the time-frequency representation of the BVP was ranked highest and played a crucial role in the classification. Our study suggests the potential of using BVP recorded from wearable devices to detect emotions in healthcare applications. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press.