COPENHAGEN (May 21, 2026) – iMotions, the world’s leading software platform for human behavior research, today announced the availability of the Affectiva Emotion SDK on Android, bringing its advanced facial expression and emotion recognition capabilities directly onto the world’s most widely used mobile operating system.
This release significantly broadens how and where developers can deploy emotion-aware applications across, enabling entirely local, on-device processing featuring improved performance, increased privacy and lower infrastructure costs from an on-device solution. With existing support for Windows and Ubuntu, this release expands access to Android-based devices, including VR/AR headsets, automotive systems, and embedded platforms. Read more here about uses for bringing emotion recognition AI to the edge.
“By bringing Affectiva’s Emotion SDK to Android, we’re giving developers a way to build emotion-aware experiences that run at the edge, protect people’s privacy, and scale to millions of devices without massive infrastructure,” said Peter Hartzbech, Founder & CEO of iMotions. “This is a significant step toward the future we believe in: human behavior insights that are more accurate, more contextual, and more respectful of the people behind the screen.”
For years, real-time behavioral intelligence has typically depended on cloud-based processing, requiring video to be streamed to remote servers and back before applications could respond. By porting the Affectiva Emotion SDK to Android, iMotions is enabling completely local, on-device inference where video frames are captured and analyzed directly on Android devices in real time. This dramatically reduces latency, strengthens privacy protections, and lessens reliance on network connectivity or costly backend infrastructure.
The Android release brings Affectiva’s full suite of facial expression analysis capabilities to mobile, allowing developers to detect nuanced emotional responses using only the device camera. Built on deep learning models trained on large, diverse facial expression datasets, the SDK is optimized for mobile hardware and can track multiple faces simultaneously with high accuracy and low false detections.
On-device processing also makes the Affectiva Emotion SDK inherently privacy-first. Because facial analysis happens locally, raw camera feeds and image data do not need to be transmitted or stored in the cloud, helping organizations better align with stringent data protection frameworks such as GDPR and CCPA and supporting deployments in highly sensitive environments like healthcare, automotive, and enterprise research. This enables new opt-in consumer experiences where users can interact with emotion-aware applications knowing their video data remains on their own device.
Running locally on Android eliminates round-trip delays to remote servers, delivering truly real-time expression tracking for use cases where milliseconds matter. Developers can now build Android applications that adapt instantly to user reactions, from interactive mobile games and adaptive media to in-cabin monitoring systems and immersive AR/VR experiences, without requiring continuous connectivity. Offline operation further extends deployment possibilities to field research, travel environments, and edge systems where network access is unreliable or unavailable.
By shifting computation from the cloud to the device, organizations can also reduce infrastructure costs while scaling to much larger user bases. Android powers billions of smartphones, tablets, kiosks, smart displays, and vehicle infotainment systems worldwide, providing a broad foundation for emotion-aware experiences that combine low latency, high reliability, and flexible deployment. With support for Windows, Ubuntu, and now Android, the Affectiva Emotion SDK continues to expand the environments in which developers can design and scale next-generation, emotion-aware applications that better understand and respond to human behavior in real time.
About iMotions
Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Copenhagen, iMotions has developed the world’s leading human behavior research software platform. More than 1,500 organizations around the world – from leading academic institutions to global brands and highly respected healthcare organizations – use iMotions to access real-time and nonconscious emotional, cognitive and behavioral data. By integrating and synchronizing all types of sensors into a single platform, iMotions provides researchers with access to deeper and richer insights – and the most complete picture of human behavior. For more information, visit iMotions.com.
Media Contacts
Todd Graff for iMotions
+1 617-309-0401