Today, a joint ROCK project team of the City of Vilnius and the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) starts measuring how you feel entering the City of Vilnius and leaving it. 4 sensors were installed in the main service centre of the capital at Konstitucijos pr. 3, which will capture physiological data at the main entrances to the municipal building.
“Not only sensors, but depersonalized data processed using special algorithms will be used during this pilot project in order to understand the relation between the quality of services provided by the municipality and the overall emotional state of its employees, residents and guests of the city, and how it is affected by the surrounding environment and sensations. Such study is not a novelty in the world, but the improvement of the methods for conducting such research allows measuring the provision of services relating to mood change more accurately and monitoring how decisions to create a happier environment work in practice,” says Eglė Radvilė, IT consultant at the City of Vilnius and a member of the ROCK project working group.
The aim of conducting this study at the municipality is to help create a more comfortable environment that best meets the needs of residents and guests of the city and a more precise range of services, also learning the factors that affect people (employees, customers, stakeholders, visitors, guests and others) who visit the municipal building, and how their emotions change as they leave.
Special equipment will record emotions of persons that end up in the video surveillance field (happy, frustrated, angry, surprised, appalled, disgusted, neutral state; also their valence and excitement), their affective states (boredom, interest and confusion) and physiological data: average composition of passers-by by sex and age group, pulse and respiratory rate.
Decisions of the Vilnius team of the unique ROCK project have repeatedly surprised not only colleagues from other European cities, but residents and guests of the city already had a possibility to test sensors in real time, and coloured the monument of the Three Crosses with the help of their emotions and lights at the festival of lights on the occasion of the capital’s birthday. But this is not the limits for the team, as it continues expanding the areas of use of the project, with the latest of them being the measurement of the quality of services provided by the city.
The team of the ROCK project being implemented for more than two years now believes that depersonalized information collected using the neuroanalysis system sensors could come in handy in the future not only for city planning professionals or for assessing the quality of services provided by the municipality, but it could also be used by business representatives creating personalized services, for example, deciding on how to excite certain parts of the Old Town, or what groups of people and when should be offered one or another service.
A digital programme for calculating the happiness rate of Vilnius residents is already under development. The first tests were successful – the average expression of happiness is already calculated in real time, every three seconds, at 6 locations of the city, and it will soon be possible to see the average happiness of the last year, months, days and hours (based on the circadian cycle of the day) at 6 city locations in the winter and 8 locations in the summer
Note: all data collected in the course of the study have been anonymised and are in line with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation and other legal acts governing personal data protection. Images displayed by the video surveillance equipment are not recorded.
The project is implemented by the City of Vilnius together with scientists from the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University.
