The startup that tracks your emotions by how you touch your smartphone

Ranjan Kumar and I sit in an office above the streets of Bangalore. The golden afternoon light on the city outside contrasts with the neat blue-white of the space. I’ve just asked him about feelings, something that’s made him leap out of his chair in excitement and begin drawing on a board.

“I happened to be a teacher for a while in my career, so I love to do whiteboards,” he tells me, and draws a two-axis diagram which looked like something out of my high school geometry class.

Ranjan heads up Entropik Technologies, a startup which seeks to make interactions between humans and machines seamless. The tech he’s building reads your interactions and gauges how you feel while you’re performing them.

I happened to be a teacher for a while in my career, so I love to do whiteboards.

Ranjan’s diagram – called a circumplex model – explains their first product, Chromo. It reads the smartphone user’s screen touches and quantifies that into different emotions, complete with degrees of positivity or negativity as well as levels of intensity.

He marks emotions for me on the graph – happiness, which is intense and positive; relaxation, which is positive but with low intensity; anger, which is negative with high intensity; and boredom, which is negative with low intensity.

Depending on how hard and fast you touch your phone screen, Chromo takes a reading of valence – whether the emotion is positive or negative – and intensity. The product also has motion sensing abilities. It can tell if a user is stationary, walking, or running. It knows the position of the phone (portrait or landscape, whether the user is holding the phone with the screen facing up or down).

“We utilize that stuff to analyze everything around a user: where you are, what you’re doing,” Ranjan explains. In turn, fashion ecommerce and research companies can use Chromo to collect data. Knowing how a person’s emotions change while watching a video, for example, can help a content site know what kinds of stories to publish.

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Standing out in the emotion recognition race

Ranjan Kumar, founder and CEO of Entropik, previously founded party discovery startup OyeParty and brand marketing startup RedCastle.

Tracking customers’ opinions and engagement is nothing new. A few companies have ventured into tracking customers emotions. Instead of Entropik’s focus on touch, they tend to focus on reading people’s facial expressions in real time. Emovu uses deep learning to detect emotions, and MIT spinoff Affectiva tracks customers’ reactions via facial recognition AI and big data.

Sensaura is a company that focuses on touch – it tracks customers’ feelings via their wearables, not their smartphone screens.

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