Technologies for emotion-aware systems

Emotions influence physiological processes in humans and are controlled by the autonomous nervous system. Emotions result in generally observable variations in a human's behaviour or physiological parameters that can be accessed with modern technology. For use in HCI contexts, emotion detection technology has to be minimally obtrusive and needs to be easy to use. In this article we present the latest developments in the field of emotion recognition technology undertaken at Fraunhofer IGD, Rostock, with focus on easily measurable physiological parameters. Methods of data mining and knowledge discovery used to build emotion classifiers are briefly described as is the underlying communication framework for networking the emotion processing components involved. Finally, a novel, configurable emotion induction application is introduced along with an emotion visualisation tool, which have been designed especially for emotion studies in the HCI context.