Cornelia Setz
Bert Arnrich

Project Start: 2007

Project Description

This project focuses on the automatic detection of emotions and stress. While activity recognition has already a longer history, emotion recognition is a rather young discipline that is gaining more and more interest. Many applications for emotion recognition can be found in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). By including emotions, HCI shall become more natural, i.e. more similar to human-human interactions where information is not only transmitted by the semantic content of words but also by emotional signaling, e.g. in prosody, facial expression and gesture.

Besides the HCI field, emotion recognition is also relevant for personal healthcare. For people suffering from a mental disease, emotion recognition can provide the therapists with more insight into the daily variations of the patient’s state and enable emergency actions. Additionally, emotion recognition might be used for prevention and early detection of stress, burn-outs and depressions.

This project is linked to the European FP6 project SEAT which aims at increasing comfort for airplane passengers by developing a smart seat. Since the subjective appraisal of comfort is very important, emotion and stress recognition can help in determining appropriate adjustments of the seat, the environment, the entertainment system or the attendance of the stewardess for each passenger individually.