Lenovo Virtual Classroom System Uses Facial Biometrics to Measure Student Response

A new Lenovo virtual classroom platform uses facial biometrics to assess students’ responses to lectures.

Called AirClass, it comes equipped with a feature called Emotions Insight, which tracks not just whether students’ eyes are open or closed, but various other facial indicators of emotions like surprise and confusion. The system aggregates this data to give instructors a general sense of how their lectures are engaging students.

AirClass’s biometric feature is based on Ver-ID, the flagship facial recognition platform of Toronto-based Applied Recognition. The company says Ver-ID’s foundational face detection algorithm, FaceLocate, has been trained on over a thousand faces across the span of more than a decade.

This is one of a small handful of systems that have emerged in recent months to enable the biometric monitoring of students’ faces. The Paris School of Business, for example, is preparing to launch such a system for its online lectures this year, while a teacher in China, evidently not satisfied with his own assessments of student attention, developed such a system for use in the classroom itself.

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July 6, 2017 – by Alex Perala