Affective Software, Inc.

John Gottman

Rafael Lisitsa

Vladimir Brayman

Yuriy Gulak

Connor Eaton

Robert W Bergstrom

The current document is directed to a methods and systems that use observational data collected by various devices and sensors to generate electronic-data representations of human conversations. The implementations of these methods and systems, disclosed in the current document, provide a highly extensible and generic platform for converting observational data into affect-annotated-timeline outputs that provide both a textual transcription of a conversation and a parallel set of affect annotations to the conversation. The affect-annotated-timeline outputs may be useful to researchers and developers, but also serve as inputs to any of a wide variety of downstream analytical processes and analysis systems that are, in turn, incorporated into many different types of special-purpose analysis and control systems.

Automated systems and methods that generate affect-annotated timelines

The current document is directed to methods and systems that provide an emotional compass that reflects the emotional states of human beings, dynamics of the emotional states over time periods, emotional synchronization between humans and between humans and automated interactive systems, and the degree to which the emotional state of one human is influenced or affected by the emotional state of another human or by an automated interactive system. The emotional compass can be used for continuous or intermittent emotional orientation by both automated systems and human analysts. The emotional awareness provided by the emotional compass facilitates continuous or intermittent strategy selection for achieving various different types of emotion-related results.

Automated methods and systems that infer, track, store, and report emotional states and emotional dynamics to render computational systems emotionally aware

The current document is directed to a relationship-analysis system. The currently disclosed relationship-analysis system collects objective and subjective observations of participants, and their relationship, in an interaction or transaction. The objective and subjective observations are combined to generate an observation data set that is processed by a computational relationship-analysis system. The analysis produces a variety of different types of results, including trust metrics, and stores the results in memory and/or mass-storage for control of downstream analysis, reporting, and actions. Trust metrics provide a basis for carrying out numerous types of downstream actions and for generating recommendations and evaluations by various types of relationship-evaluation and relationship-management systems that employ the relationship-analysis system.

Relationship-analysis system that generates a trust metric

The current document is directed to a semi-automated, distributed, interactive relationship-counseling system. The currently disclosed interactive relationship-counseling system employs, in one configuration, two smart phones, tablets, or other personal, processor-controlled, video-enabled electronic devices and one or more server computer systems. A relationship-counseling session, in a disclosed implementation, includes a discussion, by two participants, during which the participants are isolated from one another physically, but during which each participant hears and views a real-time video of his or her partner participant on his or her video-enabled electronic device. During the discussion, each participant may be monitored by one or more physiological sensors. This stored data, along with additional input data provided by each participant when viewing a playback of the discussion, is used by analysis and processing subsystems within the server computer system to identify, evaluate, and diagnose aspects of the relationship between the two participants, following which the participants may receive reports, counseling, advice, and other information to assist the participants in understanding and improving the relationship.

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Deer Harbor, WA, United States of America

John Gottman