Emotiware

The future of emotionally intelligent learning. Capturing our children's emotions to ensure the most positive learning experience.

The emotional wellbeing of children is critical to ensure success in their learning and development. Primary and secondary classrooms must provide an environment where children feel at ease and are in the best frame of mind to absorb knowledge and interact positively with other pupils and teachers. Many children and adolescents do not fulfill their potential as a result of them not being in a positive emotional state. Negative emotions such as worry, anxiety and anger may be exacerbated by learning difficulties, speech and language difficulties, distractions and sudden or unexpected changes to routine.  All have an impact on a child’s state of mind and must be monitored and addressed from an early age.

Well-equipped classrooms often rely on traditional teaching assistants to support child learning and foster a positive learning environment. Yet, budget and resource constraints to education services require cost-efficient technology solutions to assist child development.

Emotiware addresses this issue. Pupil’s emotions are captured and analysed, via a wearable device, to better understand their emotional state and provide teachers and carers with real time information to enhance learning and improve behaviour.  The data captured is transferred to a dashboard, in real-time, where the teacher can monitor the emotional state of all pupils against which positive actions can be taken. All data is collected and managed in adherence to GDPR and relevant data laws. Furthermore, Emotiware enables teachers to monitor pupils long-term emotional footprints to identify the environments, lessons and methods that unlock pupil potential. Whilst highlighting any events within that child's day which cause distress and/or anxiety. Once this is understood positive actions can be taken to assist the emotional wellbeing of the pupil, and identify potential mental health concerns, whilst establishing a more productive learning environment for all.

Whilst Emotiware is targeted primarily towards pupils from 4 to 18 year’s old as a management tool to ensure their emotional wellbeing and enhance performance, we believe Emotiware also has a role to play with young adults, whether in Further Education or in the workplace, to self-manage their emotional wellbeing and take their own actions to ensure positive performance.

As developers of this solution, and through anticipated partnerships with Public Sector and global corporations, our desire is to enhance the emotional wellbeing of all children around the world, whether living in developed or developing countries and regardless of their social and economic class.

We firmly believe that every child has the right to feel emotionally secure and that Emotiware is the vehicle to enable this.

Wearable technology into classrooms, the interaction between the proposed device, the digital monitoring platform for teachers, and allowing them to actively respond, appraise and plan future lessons is new.
Very few companies have developed wearable technologies which measure emotions. Of the devices that have been prototyped, only the Affectiva Q Sensor bracelet is commercially available. This retails at $2,000, measures only arousal, and is aimed at the medical sector rather than the consumer market. Moreover, no device has been designed specifically for children, and our research has found no evidence of plans to use emotional data from wearables for teaching.

The technology provided by Emotiware enables educators to capture and monitor the emotional state of every pupil in their classroom/s over time. Each pupil’s emotional wellbeing can be monitored, and through the Emotiware platform, teachers can clearly see which events or points in time are having a positive or negative effect on their pupils emotional states.
Once sufficient data has been captured, it will become possible to assess whether there are visible trends between different teaching styles and a pupil’s emotional state.  This data could become hugely valuable in shaping the teaching methods used for future generations.  

Trial use of the device and teachers’ platform with cohorts of students and teachers to:

1. identify effective user experiences (including methods of gamification across various ages) to ensure student engagement;

2. refine device algorithms to improve accuracy and strengthen personalised education pathways.

3. measure the change in attainment levels of students using the devices compared with a control group to establish efficacy;

4. find effective ways to provide 360° feedback to teaching staff to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

5. develop a solution to analyse emotional trend data captured by the Emotiware device.

The Emotiware vision is to give every child, no matter their start in life, an equal opportunity to reach their full potential. This includes children across the globe, thus our future plans centre around building Emotiware into the leading international brand delivering personalised education to young children across a range of platforms. Following penetration of the UK market, expansion to the USA, Canada, the UAE and the rest of Europe will begin. We will scale globally.

Success in the social and emotional learning space relies on engaging distributors, captivating children and gaining the approval of teachers and parents. The provision of a well branded, user friendly, fun, sticky device and dashboard/app is paramount in ensuring engagement and virality. We have identified a corporate partner, through whom we will distribute the solution in the UK post trial. With the support of Solve we hope to identify global partners to assist with localisation and distribution to ensure we reach areas as remote as sub-Saharan Africa and slum communities around the globe to ensure access for all.

The solution is at prototype stage, and is not currently used.

Within the next 12 months we expect to reach 500 children, in whom we would expect to see an increase in self-regulation, increased comprehension of topics learned in class (either at point of initial delivery, or via the personalised learning module), increased academic attainment when compared to a control group.

Within the next 2 years we expect widespread adoption by schools within the UK.

Within the next 3 years we expect to have localised and scaled the solution to the US and Canada

Our team has previous experience developing new business ideas and digital products.

Erika Brodnock: Multi-award winning entrepreneur with 6+ years experience in EdTech and a previous company scaled to 15M users.

Simon Emery: Highly competent sales professional.  20+ years’ experience within international technology markets.  Passion for improving the wellbeing of children globally.

James Keyworth: Technology enthusiast with a passion for personal development and lifelong learning, currently leading the digital division of a property & real estate professional services company.

Jack Mayor: Consumer Behaviour Research Consultant. 6+ years of new product development and brand strategy experience.

Primary revenue stream will be generated from product sales to education organisations (both public and private) and distributors. Suitable partner organisations - whose mission aligns with Emotiware - can purchase anonymised (GDPR and equivalent) data and utilise our licensed software within broader programs.

Emotiware is targeting a niche of the wearable tech market, our intention is not to compete with the likes of Apple or Samsung as established wearable device manufacturers. The Emotiware device will be developed to be accessible to educational organisations globally, our vision is to make a device purchase commercially viable and scalable for schools and other educational organisations.

Informed by our emotional diagnostic technology, teachers benefit from greater understanding of their pupils emotions. More effective and tailored teaching enables increased academic attainment with fewer classroom resources. Emotiware EQ teaching plans provide teaching professionals effective, fun EQ resources to deliver emotional learning. Emotiware has the potential to exponentially change the way education is delivered worldwide, and to level the playing field between the world’s richest and poorest learners.  To this end, we would like to test, iterate and develop our solution with the support of some of the greatest minds in technology - the MIT and the Solve community.

Solve and the support of MIT afford us the opportunity collaborate with world-class researchers, utilise extended networks that can assist us in product development, distribution and positioning; peer support, mentoring and pro-bono support from industry.

In addition to heightened public exposure and credibility to Emotiware, which will help generate funding and market penetration.