SOFIA: Smart Optical Facial-Interaction Assistant

In today’s educational landscape, rising mental health concerns among adolescents highlight the need for accessible tools that support emotional self-awareness. Emotion recognition systems, particularly those tailored to young users, offer promising interventions in this domain. The current paper presents SOFIA, a multimodal emotion detection system designed to enhance emotional engagement among high school students. By combining deep learning algorithms with interactive hardware, SOFIA offers real-time computing through a user-friendly experience. The system demonstrated a 95% emotion detection accuracy, a recognition latency of 2–5 seconds, and a student engagement rate of 97%, with 85% of users reporting improved emotional understanding. Integration of multimodal feedback, via a plush toy and digital interface contributed to a high usability score. Despite computational complexity and dataset limitations, SOFIA holds potential for use in educational and clinical settings.