“Are You Okay, Honey?”: Recognizing Emotions Among Couples Managing Diabetes in Daily Life Using Multimodal Real-World Smartwatch Data
George Boateng, Xiangyu Zhao, Malgorzata Speichert, Elgar Fleisch, Janina Lüscher, Theresa Pauly, Urte Scholz, Guy Bodenmann, Tobias Kowatsch · 2026
Read “Are You Okay, Honey?”: Recognizing Emotions Among Couples Managing Diabetes in Daily Life Using Multimodal Real-World Smartwatch Data by George Boateng, Xiangyu Zhao, Malgorzata Speichert, Elgar Fleisch, Janina Lüscher, Theresa Pauly, Urte Scholz, Guy Bodenmann, Tobias Kowatsch (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13210981.txt.
Description
George Boateng and eight colleagues teach smartwatches to recognize the emotions of couples managing type 2 diabetes together. Thirteen couples wore watches in daily life. The devices captured speech, heart rate, and motion. That yielded eighty-five hours of recordings, paired with self-reported feelings of pleasantness and arousal.
The machine learning models beat chance. They beat earlier laboratory work with similar couples. They even beat the partners' own guesses about each other's emotions. Balanced accuracy reached about seventy-eight percent for pleasantness. The authors frame the system as a step toward tools that help partners monitor emotional well-being. Such tools could time support interventions during the strain of shared disease management.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | George Boateng, Xiangyu Zhao, Malgorzata Speichert, Elgar Fleisch, Janina Lüscher, Theresa Pauly, Urte Scholz, Guy Bodenmann, Tobias Kowatsch |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 58 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |