Directed Effort - a generic measurand for higher level behavior analysis

Behavior and body language are essential components of human interaction. In this paper, we propose a meta-level representation of human behavior for interpretative, higher level applications in human-computer interaction systems called Directed Effort. A theoretical framework is described which is derived from behavioral and psychological sciences and which is designed to represent the commitment and interest of people towards objects via behavior analysis in real-life scenarios. Directed Effort, a score which allows the interpretation of detected behavior changes is introduced as a generic measurand. Furthermore, a prototypical implementation is documented to show the potential of the computed meta-level description of behavior.