Participant attendance is readily determined for remote conferences over a network via use of associated participant devices. Going beyond mere attendance, engagement of a participant is determined by observing their actions (e.g., gestures, head movement, eye position) and interactions (e.g., talking, text chat, etc.) within the conference. Such engagement is scored and the value of the score is then used to trigger engagement responses, such as reporting the score to a repository or stakeholder, or initiating a remediation action, such as addressing a network fault.