TR#537: Affective Medicine: Technology with Emotional Intelligence
Rosalind W. Picard
To appear as a chapter in book: "Future of Health Technology," ed. by R. Bushko, 2001 IOS Press
ABSTRACT
For a long time people have kept emotions out of the deliberate tools
of medicine and science; scientists, physicians, and patients have
often felt and sometimes expressed emotion, but no tools could sense,
measure, and respond to their affective information. A series of
recent studies indicates that emotions, particularly stress, anger,
and depression, are important factors with serious and significant
implications for health. This paper highlights research at the MIT
Media Lab aimed at giving computers the ability to comfortably sense,
recognize, and respond to certain aspects of human emotion, especially
affective states such as frustration, confusion, interest, stress,
anger, and joy. Examples of recently developed systems are shown,
including computer systems that are wearable and computers that
respond to people with a kind of active listening, empathy, and
sympathy. Results are reported for computer recognition of emotion,
for teaching affective skills to autistics, and for having computers
help users manage emotions such as frustration.
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