Abstract

The boundary between the brain’s inner world—its thoughts, emotions, and cognitive processes—and the external world of perception, interaction, and behaviour is a critical frontier for both psychology and computer science. Emteq Labs provides a novel interface at this boundary, offering a real-time, wearable system that captures affective and cognitive responses through facial muscle activity, head movement, and other physiological signals.

By integrating these signals with contextual information from an onboard camera, OCOsense enables a dynamic mapping of internal states to external experiences. This allows for fine-grained analysis of how users emotionally and cognitively engage with their surroundings, offering valuable insights into attention, stress, mood, and behavioural patterns. The ability to synchronise real-time affective sensing with environmental stimuli opens up significant applications in multiple domains. These include psychological and neuroscientific research, product testing, human-computer/robot interaction, behaviour monitoring and therapy.

Biography

Charles Nduka studied medicine at Oxford and Imperial College and is an NHS Consultant Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon in London and Sussex. He maintains an active research interest particularly at the intersections of facial expressions, emotion measurement, mental health and rehabilitation. He is keenly involved in health technology research, and is the recipient of awards from the Wellcome Trust, Innovate UK and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and Horizon 2020.  He is passionate about the use of wearable devices and AI to improve lives, and in 2017 invented facial optomyography to allow low-power, all-day, real-world facial sensing and biofeedback. He founded Brighton-based Emteq Labs, to scale this technology to as many people as possible.