A high school in Hangzhou City on the eastern coast of China is using facial recognition technology to monitor student attentiveness while in the classroom.

According to The Epoch Times, Hangzhou Number 11 High School has installed three cameras at the front of the classroom to scan student faces every 30 seconds to analyze facial expressions and detect student moods. The different moods being recognized by the system — surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral — are recorded and averaged during the course of each class period.

A display screen, visible only to the teacher, shows the resulting data in real-time with pre-determined value ranges being used as a guide to decide whether a student is paying attention. The screen also displays for the teacher a running list of student names deemed to be not paying attention.

The school is dubbing the facial recognition technology a “smart classroom behavior management system.” The system is also able to analyze certain student actions and group them into behavioral categories that include reading, listening, writing, standing up, raising a hand and leaning on a desk.

This initiative marks just the latest in a growing number of biometric deployments in Chinese schools. Another recent biometric implementation in the region has seen some 300 students at a university in the eastern city of Nanjing stand in front of an interactive tablet screen when entering lectures. Using facial recognition, photos taken at the tablet screen are then matched against those logged in the university’s database to log student attendance.

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