Facial expression tracking for remote conferencing applications: An approach to tackling the disadvantages of remote worker multitasking

In face-to-face work, discussion and negotiation relies strongly on non-verbal feedback, which provides important clues to negotiation states such as agreement/disagreement and understanding/confusion. With the continued rise of virtual teams, collaborative work increasingly requires tools to manage the reality of distributed and remote work, which is often hampered by a lack of social cohesion and such phenomena as participant multi-tasking. This paper outlines our project which develops and experimentally assesses a proof-of-concept AI- and Image Processing- Based software agent (Emotion tracking Agent or ETA) for the monitoring of the presence and emotional states of co-workers in virtual meetings.