Summary
Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with
and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or
deliberately influences emotions”.
AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions
and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical
domain.
Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine,
and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics.
Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health
are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related
literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their
range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples.
Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate
the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home
healthcare, Am I, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally
expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential
of AC has been realized and applications have emerged.
Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical
informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing
state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects
reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the
affective medicine field.
Keywords
Affective computing - emotions - health - medicine - human-computer interaction -
learning - autism - biosensor networks