An Intelligent Decision Support System for Emotion Monitoring using Microscopic Fixational Dynamics

Abstract

The rising prevalence of psychological disorders necessitates effective emotion monitoring, yet current methods relying on facial or physiological signals often suffer from intrusiveness and privacy issues. This paper proposes an intelligent decision support system and pervasive edge-computing framework that leverages smart glasses and a companion smartphone to infer emotional states from microscopic visual fixation patterns. Moving beyond traditional macroscopic gaze metrics, the proposed system extracts and decomposes three distinct neurophysiological micro-movements: microsaccades, ocular drifts, and ocular microtremors. We introduce an interpretable hybrid artificial intelligence pipeline combining a multi-head attention mechanism, extreme gradient boosting, and a support vector machine to extract deep temporal features, quantify their physiological importance, and perform efficient on-device classification. Through an extensive evaluation involving 60 volunteers, we rigorously validate the framework under a strict leave-one-subject-out cross-validation protocol across both controlled and naturalistic mobile scenarios. Ablation studies unequivocally demonstrate that these fixational micro-movements are substantially more discriminative for emotion inference than traditional macroscopic features. Furthermore, aligned with contemporary affective science, the system incorporates a few-shot personalization mechanism to bridge universal physiological baselines with individual emotional heterogeneity, achieving a highly robust personalized F1-score of 83.6%. This work establishes a physiologically interpretable, unobtrusive, and deployable paradigm for continuous real-time emotion monitoring.