Appraisal theory-based mobile app for physiological data collection and labelling in the wild

Numerous studies on emotion recognition from physiological signals have been conducted in laboratory settings. However, differences in the data on emotions elicited in the lab and in the wild have been observed. Thus, there is a need for systems collecting and labelling emotion-related physiological data in ecological settings. This paper proposes a new solution to collect and label such data: an open-source mobile application (app) based on the appraisal theory. Our approach exploits a commercially available wearable physiological sensor connected to a smartphone. The app detects relevant events from the physiological data, and prompts the users to report their emotions using a questionnaire based on the Ortony, Clore and Collins (OCC) Model. We believe that the app can be used to collect emotional and physiological data in ecological settings and to ensure high quality of ground truth labels.