Facial-Movement Review for Recorded Classes
Per-minute aggregate facial-movement heatmaps from any recorded lecture, seminar, or live class, time-coded to source footage for reviewing the material. It cannot measure student engagement, learning, or ability, and is never used to grade or assess individual students.
Clicks and time-on-task don't show what the room's faces were doing
Click-rate, video-completion percentage, and time-on-task are easy to measure but tell you nothing about the observable facial movement in the room. A recorded session holds that signal, but no one reviews it consistently.
Manual classroom observation is expensive and infrequent. Mental Edge adds an aggregate, time-coded record of observable facial movement — it does not and cannot measure student engagement, learning, attention as an inner state, ability, or wellbeing, and it must never be used to grade or assess individual students.
Aggregate, time-coded facial-movement signal from any recorded session
Mental Edge analyzes recorded lectures, seminars, and live-class sessions and produces per-minute aggregate facial-movement summaries — for example AU4 (brow lowerer) activation and overall expressivity — each linked to the point in the recording where it occurred.
Outputs are aggregated by default to protect individual privacy. Instructional designers can see which minutes of a session showed observable changes in facial movement across the cohort and revisit the source footage; the report is a prompt for human review of the material, not a measure of how much any student learned or engaged.
Capabilities
- Aggregate-by-default analytics — Facial-movement signal is reported at the cohort level, never per-student, unless the institution explicitly opts in with informed consent and a clear lawful basis. It is never used to grade or assess a student.
- Per-minute lecture heatmaps — See which minutes of a 50-minute recording showed the largest changes in aggregate facial movement, each linked to the clip, so designers can revisit those segments instead of guessing.
- Compare cohorts and revisions — Compare the same aggregate facial-movement measure across recordings of different lecture versions. The measure describes observable movement on camera — it is not a score of learning or engagement.
- Works with existing video — No new hardware in the classroom. Ingests recorded sessions from Panopto, Zoom, Canvas Studio, and the like.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this measure student engagement or learning?
No. Mental Edge cannot measure student engagement, learning, attention as an inner state, ability, or wellbeing. It reports observable, aggregate facial-movement signals from recorded sessions, time-coded to the footage, for instructional designers to review the material — not the students.
Can this be used to grade or assess individual students?
No. Mental Edge must not be used to grade, rank, assess, or make any high-stakes decision about a student. It reports aggregate facial movement to help review instructional material, not individuals.
Is this surveillance of students?
No. The default mode reports aggregate facial-movement signals across a cohort, not per-student tracking. Any per-student review requires explicit institutional and student opt-in with appropriate consent language and is never used for assessment.
What does the report actually show?
Observable facial-movement measurements — for example positive-affect-associated AUs (AU6, AU12), AU4 (brow lowerer), and overall expressivity — aggregated across the visible faces and linked to timestamps in the recording. It is a description of movement on camera, not an emotion label or an engagement score.
Will the system work with younger students?
Mental Edge's core models are validated on adolescent and adult faces. For pediatric research, the underlying FACS framework has a Baby FACS variant; contact us about pilot use cases.
How does it handle students who turn cameras off?
The system processes only visible faces. Students who opt out by disabling their camera are simply excluded from that session's aggregate — there is no penalty or flagging.
Can we use this for online courses?
Yes. Mental Edge works with any recorded video source, including async course recordings, live webinars, and synchronous online classes.
What does it cost for a department or institution?
Pro + Analytics is $129.99/month per seat. Departmental and institutional licensing is available — contact info@mentaledge.ai.
Recommended tier: Pro + Analytics ($129.99/mo) — Cohort dashboards, per-minute heatmaps, and revision-comparison reports live in the Pro + Analytics tier.
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