To grasp what the customer’s emotion of a product or a service is very important. What is emotion tracking?

People express their emotion with their whole body even when they don’t say it. When emotion occurs, it accompanies the change of the brain or the change of the body through autonomic nerve system’s activation. With the advanced equipment, we track the customer’s subconscious and deep emotional responses by measuring the change of emotion.

Different types of brainwave occur, depending on human’s mental state (arousal, emotion, attention, mental load, stress, etc). With this, we can figure out the following information.

• Arousal: Measures if one’s mentally aroused or calm
• Matchness: Measures if the information causes cognitive dissonance
• Mental load: Measures if the situation causes mental stress, such as inferring or calculating something complex
• Emotional bias: Measures relative emotion/logical bias by comparing the activeness of brain’s hemisphere

Pupil accepts the light and changes its size dynamically depending on the brightness of outdoors lights.

These characteristics can be applied to analyze the influence of indoors/outdoors lights on people and the physiological influence of TV and computer monitor’s brightness on people.

Pupil size also changes by momentary interest or excitement. Old Chinese jewelers used to observe the pupil size of the customer to sell the products that make their pupils bigger.

Psychological change such as arousal or tense influence heartbeat. The change of the heartbeat has a slower response than GSR or EEG, but is accurate when experimenting the task with the physical load. HB can be useful when measuring if the customer is having a hard time moving the product or if the stairs and corridor cause tiredness for the customer.

If attaching electrode or wearing a band type sensor on the chest to measure the HB is uncomfortable, you can also measure the HB in a more simple way with PPG sensor, the tweezer-looking sensor that you apply your fingertip.

Psychological changes such as arousal or tense causes the activation of autonomic nerve system and this activation cause the skin to sweat minutely. This tiny sweat causes the change of skin’s electric feature, and this can be measured with a voltmeter. This response is called GSR(Galvanic Skin Response, or EDR) and it has been used in the polygraph. GSR can be easily used by simply putting on the fingertips while shopping or while watching the advertisement and can offer an immediate response of the customer’s excitement or stress.

For instance, we can conduct an experiment of showing various types of products and analyze which product caused the most excitement for the customer by tracking emotion continually.

Facial expression is what all humans have in common. It is also the most basic and direct expression of emotion. Among the various types of facial expression measurements, the ‘facial EMG’, which measures the activation of facial muscles that causes the expression, is the most sensitive one.

When feeling unpleasant, people unconsciously frown their brows, tense their jaws or lips. In contrast, when feeling pleasant, they smile with their eyes and lips. Emotion causes this minute change of facial muscles and even though it is not detectable with eyes, it can be detected by measuring facial muscle’s electrical activity.

The frequency of blinking can be measured with eye tracking data. Blinking can tell us the gradual increase or decrease of interest.

When feeling tense or anxious, the frequency of blinking increases. This was applied especially in casinos. Lots of gamblers observed the other party’s blinking to speculate their cards. Similarly, detectives observe blinking when investigating the crimes. In contrast, blinking tends to decrease when the contents are boring or when one’s tired.