Integrating Emotion Recognition Tools for Developing Emotionally Intelligent Agents

Emotionally responsive agents that can simulate emotional intelligence increase the acceptance of users towards them, as the feeling of empathy reduces negative perceptual feedback. This has fostered research on emotional intelligence during last decades, and nowadays numerous cloud and local tools for automatic emotional recognition are available, even for inexperienced users. These tools however usually focus on the recognition of discrete emotions sensed from one communication channel, even though multimodal approaches have been shown to have advantages over unimodal approaches. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to show our approach for multimodal emotion recognition using Kalman filters for the fusion of available discrete emotion recognition tools. The proposed system has been modularly developed based on an evolutionary approach so to be integrated in our digital ecosystems, and new emotional recognition sources can be easily integrated. Obtained results show improvements over unimodal tools when recognizing naturally displayed emotions

Guidelines for performing Systematic Research Projects Reviews

There are different methods and techniques to carry out systematic reviews in order to address a set of research questions or getting the state of the art of a particular topic, but there is no a method to carry out a systematic analysis of research projects not only based on scientific publications. The main challenge is the difference between research projects and scientific literature. Research projects are a collection of information in different formats and available in different places. Even projects from the same funding call follow a different structure in most of the cases, despite there were some requirements that they should meet at the end of the funding period. Furthermore, the sources in which the scientific literature is available provide metadata and powerful search tools, meanwhile most of the research projects are not stored in public and accessible databases, or the databases usually do not provide enough information and tools to conduct a systematic search. For this reason, this work provides the guidelines to support systematics reviews of research projects following the method called Systematic Research Projects Review (SRPR). This methodology is based on the Kitchenham’s adaptation of the systematic literature review

Trends in European research projects focused on technological ecosystems in the health sector

Over the past decade, the health domain has grown at a fast pace. The stakeholders are not only limited to patients, but also include formal and informal careers, doctors, research institutions and technological solution providers. As such, different technological ecosystems of interconnected health communities have arisen to adopt the best practices to improve the wellbeing and health of patients. In order to identify the lacks and opportunities in this area, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the ecosystems in the health domain, presenting a systematic mapping study of research projects developed in Europe and related to the field. The systematic mapping review was conducted on the AAL Programme, CORDIS and KEEP databases. The paper describes the methodology employed for conducting such a review, and provides an analysis of results that give an overview of the evolution of related European projects until today along with the conclusions obtained from the study

Dynamic Facial Emotion Recognition Oriented to HCI Applications

Producción CientíficaAs part of a multimodal animated interface previously presented in [38], in this paper we describe a method for dynamic recognition of displayed facial emotions on low resolution streaming images. First, we address the detection of Action Units of the Facial Action Coding System upon Active Shape Models and Gabor filters. Normalized outputs of the Action Unit recognition step are then used as inputs for a neural network which is based on real cognitive systems architecture, and consists on a habituation network plus a competitive network. Both the competitive and the habituation layer use differential equations thus taking into account the dynamic information of facial expressions through time. Experimental results carried out on live video sequences and on the Cohn-Kanade face database show that the proposed method provides high recognition hit rates.Junta de Castilla y León (Programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación-Ref. VA036U14)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA013A12-2)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Grant DPI2014-56500-R

Docencia de la asignatura Interacción Persona-Ordenador en tiempos de pandemia: una experiencia con Microsoft Teams

Todos los sectores de la sociedad se han visto afectados durante la crisis sanitaria causada por la COVID-19. La pandemia ha impulsado cambios en el sector educativo, principalmente relacionados con la transformación digital de los procesos. Estos cambios no solo en el uso de la tecnología sino también en el enfoque metodológico utilizado. En este escenario, se desarrolla la adaptación de la asignatura Interacción Persona-Ordenador, primero a formato online durante el curso 2019-20, y después a formato presencial con retransmisión online para el curso 2020-21. En este proceso, la incorporación de Microsoft Teams ha permitido reforzar la metodología de aprendizaje basado en proyectos y mejorar la comunicación con el alumnado. Este trabajo describe la experiencia como ejemplo para incorporar Microsoft Teams en otras asignaturas independientemente de si la docencia se desarrolla en formato presencial, online o híbrido

Design of a Realistic Robotic Head based on Action Coding System

Producción CientíficaIn this paper, the development of a robotic head able to move and show di erent emotions is addressed. The movement and emotion generation system has been designed following the human facial muscu- lature. Starting from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), we have built a 26 actions units model that is able to produce the most relevant movements and emotions of a real human head. The whole work has been carried out in two steps. In the rst step, a mechanical skeleton has been designed and built, in which the di erent actuators have been inserted. In the second step, a two-layered silicon skin has been manu- factured, on which the di erent actuators have been inserted following the real muscle-insertions, for performing the di erent movements and gestures. The developed head has been integrated in a high level be- havioural architecture, and pilot experiments with 10 users regarding emotion recognition and mimicking have been carried out.Junta de Castilla y León (Programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación-Ref. VA036U14)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA013A12-2)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Grant DPI2014-56500-R

Technological Ecosystems in the Health Sector: a Mapping Study of European Research Projects

The European Union has a substantial investment in research and development and demand side-measures in the health sector in order to promote new initiatives, prevent disease and foster healthy lifestyles. In particular, the European Commission and other European entities have funded research projects focused on the use of technology in the health sector. In this context, health research initiatives have evolved from user-centred monolithic solutions into collaborative partnerships of different stakeholders that gather around different technological platforms. In order to identify the lacks and opportunities in this area, a systematic mapping study was conducted with the aim of identifying and analysing the recent research projects developed in Europe related to technological ecosystems in the health sector. The study covered closed European research projects from 2003 to 2018. This paper aims to extend that systematic mapping study through ongoing research projects. The analysis of these research projects provides an overview of the current trends and identify the lacks and opportunities to define new advances in this research area. Moreover, the comparison between the first mapping study focused on closed projects, and the current study, allows getting an overview of the evolution of technological ecosystems in the health sector

Long-Term Assessment of a Service Robot in a Hotel Environment

Producción CientíficaThe long term evaluation of the Sacarino robot is presented in this paper. This study aimed to improve the robot`s capabilities as a bellboy in a hotel; walking alongside the guests, providing information about the city and the hotel and providing hotel-related services. The paper establishes a three-stage assessment methodology based on the continuous measurement of a set of metrics regard- ing navigation and interaction with guests. Sacarino has been automatically collecting information in a real hotel environment for long periods of time. The acquired information has been analyzed and used to improve the robot's opera- tion in the hotel through successive re nements. Some interesting considerations and useful hints for the researchers of service robots have been extracted from the analysis of the results.Junta de Castilla y León (Programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación-Ref. VA036U14)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA013A12-2)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Grant DPI2014-56500-R

A bellboy robot: Study of the effects of robot behaviour on user engagement and comfort

Producción CientíficaThis paper provides the results of various trial experiments in a hotel environment carried out using Sacarino, an interactive bellboy robot. We analysed which aspects of the robot design and behaviour are relevant in terms of user engagement and comfort when interacting with our social robot. The experiments carried out focused on the influence over proxemics, duration and effectiveness of the interaction taking into account three dichotomous factors related with the robot design and behaviour: robot embodiment (with/without robotic body), status of the robot (awake/asleep) and who starts communication (robot/user). Results show that users tend to maintain a personal distance when interacting with an embodied robot and that embodiment engages users in maintaining longer interactions. On the other hand, including a greeting model in a robot is useful in terms of engaging users to maintain longer interactions, and that an active-looking robot is more attractive to the participants, producing longer interactions than in the case of a passive-looking robot.Junta de Castilla y León (Programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación-Ref. VA036U14)Junta de Castilla y León (Programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación-Ref. VA013A12-2)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Grant DPI2014-56500-R