Legitimating Emotion Tracking Technologies in Driver Monitoring Systems

Contemporary automobiles are now incorporating digital technologies, including emotion recognition technologies intended to monitor and sometimes intervene on the driver’s mood, attentiveness, or emotional state. We investigate how the firms producing these technologies justify and legitimate their design, production, and use, and how these discourses of legitimation paint a picture of the desired social role of emotion recognition in the automotive sector. Through a critical discourse analysis of patents, advertising, and promotional materials from industry-leading companies Cerence and Affectiva/Smart Eye, we argue both companies use potentially spurious arguments about the accuracy of emotion recognition to rationalize their products. Both companies also use a variety of other legitimation techniques around driver safety, individual personalization, and increased productivity to re-frame the social aspects of digitally mediated autonomous vehicles on their terms.