Emotions detection on an ambient intelligent system using wearable devices

In this paper we present an Ambient Intelligent System, the iGenda, and the integration of a wearable device. The aim is to detect emotional states through the wearable device and ultimately represent and manage the social emotion of a group of entities. The advantage of this action is that its usability is in line with retirement homes and similar places, where the community is extended and an harmonious environment is imperative. The iGenda serves has the visual interface and the information centre, receiving the information from the wearable device and managing the community emotion by sending information to the care-receivers, caregivers, or changing home parameters (like music or lighting) to achieve an specific emotion (such as calm or excitement). Thus the goal is to provide an affective system that directly interacts with humans by discreetly improving their lifestyle.FCT - Fuel Cell Technologies Program (UID/CEC/00319/2013)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Assistive Handwashing System with Emotional Intelligence

Whether emotional intelligence (or, affective reasoning) is included can influence the effectiveness of a cognitive assistive system. This thesis presents a novel emotionally intelligent hand-washing assistant that aims to help older adults with Alzheimer's disease complete hand-washing tasks more independently. The thesis reviews previous works in the development of cognitive assistants and in the study of emotional intelligence, and then designs a hand-washing system prototype that combines the two research streams. The difficulties in designing such a system, including probabilistic and decision-theoretic reasoning of the user's functional and emotional states, computer-vision based activity monitoring and affective recognition, and embodied prompting are discussed. Designing the hand-washing system as an integration of independent components, the thesis also discusses coordination between the components. The thesis implements the system in the end, and shows by preliminary tests in laboratory settings that the system implemented (1) runs in real-time from the perspective of the user group, (2) is able to provide a level of functional assistance, (3) produces system prompts that have encoded to some extent the emotional state of its user. The preliminary tests also indicated that a user with emotions with high potency levels (and high activity levels) is more likely to receive system prompts with low potency levels (and high activity levels). This thesis is one of the exploratory works in the area of integrating emotional intelligence with cognitive intelligent assistive systems. It provides a solution to fitting emotional intelligence in a functional system, as well as points out directions for future improvements. The framework designed in this thesis is portable and extensible, and can be generalized to be used in other applications

Development Of a Multisensorial System For Emotions Recognition

Automated reading and analysis of human emotion has the potential to be a powerful tool to develop a wide variety of applications, such as human-computer interaction systems, but, at the same time, this is a very difficult issue because the human communication is very complex. Humans employ multiple sensory systems in emotion recognition. At the same way, an emotionally intelligent machine requires multiples sensors to be able to create an affective interaction with users. Thus, this Master thesis proposes the development of a multisensorial system for automatic emotion recognition. The multisensorial system is composed of three sensors, which allowed exploring different emotional aspects, as the eye tracking, using the IR-PCR technique, helped conducting studies about visual social attention; the Kinect, in conjunction with the FACS-AU system technique, allowed developing a tool for facial expression recognition; and the thermal camera, using the FT-RoI technique, was employed for detecting facial thermal variation. When performing the multisensorial integration of the system, it was possible to obtain a more complete and varied analysis of the emotional aspects, allowing evaluate focal attention, valence comprehension, valence expressions, facial expression, valence recognition and arousal recognition. Experiments were performed with sixteen healthy adult volunteers and 105 healthy children volunteers and the results were the developed system, which was able to detect eye gaze, recognize facial expression and estimate the valence and arousal for emotion recognition, This system also presents the potential to analyzed emotions of people by facial features using contactless sensors in semi-structured environments, such as clinics, laboratories, or classrooms. This system also presents the potential to become an embedded tool in robots to endow these machines with an emotional intelligence for a more natural interaction with humans. Keywords: emotion recognition, eye tracking, facial expression, facial thermal variation, integration multisensoria

EMERALD—Exercise Monitoring Emotional Assistant

The increase in the elderly population in today’s society entails the need for new policies to maintain an adequate level of care without excessively increasing social spending. One of the possible options is to promote home care for the elderly. In this sense, this paper introduces a personal assistant designed to help elderly people in their activities of daily living. This system, called EMERALD, is comprised of a sensing platform and different mechanisms for emotion detection and decision-making that combined produces a cognitive assistant that engages users in Active Aging. The contribution of the paper is twofold—on the one hand, the integration of low-cost sensors that among other characteristics allows for detecting the emotional state of the user at an affordable cost; on the other hand, an automatic activity suggestion module that engages the users, mainly oriented to the elderly, in a healthy lifestyle. Moreover, by continuously correcting the system using the on-line monitoring carried out through the sensors integrated in the system, the system is personalized, and, in broad terms, emotionally intelligent. A functional prototype is being currently tested in a daycare centre in the northern area of Portugal where preliminary tests show positive results.This research was partially funded by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2019 and Post-Doc Grant SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (Angelo Costa). This work is also partially funded by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and RISEWISE (RISEWomen with disabilities In Social Engagement) EU project under Agreement No. 690874.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A conceptual framework for interactive virtual storytelling

This paper presents a framework of an interactive storytelling system. It can integrate five components: management centre, evaluation centre, intelligent virtual agent, intelligent virtual environment, and users, making possible interactive solutions where the communication among these components is conducted in a rational and intelligent way. Environment plays an important role in providing heuristic information for agents through communicating with the management centre. The main idea is based on the principle of heuristic guiding of the behaviour of intelligent agents for guaranteeing the unexpectedness and consistent themes

Linking recorded data with emotive and adaptive computing in an eHealth environment

Telecare, and particularly lifestyle monitoring, currently relies on the ability to detect and respond to changes in individual behaviour using data derived from sensors around the home. This means that a significant aspect of behaviour, that of an individuals emotional state, is not accounted for in reaching a conclusion as to the form of response required. The linked concepts of emotive and adaptive computing offer an opportunity to include information about emotional state and the paper considers how current developments in this area have the potential to be integrated within telecare and other areas of eHealth. In doing so, it looks at the development of and current state of the art of both emotive and adaptive computing, including its conceptual background, and places them into an overall eHealth context for application and development