Research approach concerning emotions of people with PIMD using physiological parameters and facial expressions

[ghost]

Dear Sir or Madam,

For my PhD thesis, I want to take a deeper focus on the combination of physiological parameters and facial expression to analyse the emotional expression of people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities.
During my search, I came across your software and, maybe, it is suitable to my approach.

Shorts explanation of the target group:
First, each person with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities is very individual concerning her/his competencies and impairments. However, there are some characteristics that apply to a large number affected persons:

• profound intellectual disability (IQ < 20) combined with other disabilities (e.g., motor impairment, sensorial disabilities (hearing or visual impairment))
• communication: usually no verbal language
• usually no understanding of symbols
• maybe no use of common behaviour signals (e.g., different showing of facial expression in comparison to people without disabilities) -> for example, “smiling” is not always a signal for happiness

So, the problem is that these target group cannot tell us directly how they feel. Therefore, I created the following plan and maybe you can say me, if this is possible (with your software):

1. I want to trigger special emotional situations for the person with disabilities based on the information of her/his parents and caregivers.
2. These situations should be recorded with a focus on the face.
3. Afterwards, the personal facial expression of an emotion can be extracted -> Several Pictures of several situations that show the same facial expression, which stand for one emotion. The same procedure for other emotions.
4. The last step includes a field trail, in which these emotions should be recognisable using machine processing/software in daily life.

Do you think that I can train your software with the pictures that I get from the special emotional situations and use this trained software to recognize in the specific facial expression in a totally new recording?
So, is it possible that the software can detect the shown facial expression (which will stand in the final analysis for an emotion) in a video?
Moreover, is it possible to get some further details (like keypoints etc.) of the shown facial expression to use them in a further analysis?

To sum up, an answer would be really helpful.
Thanks!

You can also contact me directly: [email protected]

Best regards