My opinion on affective media and wearables paper when I was a young student

This is one of my Masters assignment from Media Information Processing Course which has never been published anywhere and I, as the author and copyright holder, license this assignment customized CC-BY-SA where anyone can share, copy, republish, and sell on condition to state my name as the author and notify that the original and open version available here.

My opinion and thoughts on Prof. Rosalind Picard’s paper on, “Affective media and wearables: surprising findings” will be written as following. At first there was a similarity in my lab of human interface where we develop a technology with always keeping in mind that the final receiver is always us “human being”. Also as I’m in the E-learning group, most of the evaluations are based on the users, whether it is their emotion, performance, etc. Prof. Rosalind Picard started a new research field in affective computing. Their research group background is that most technologies were created without putting emotions into consideration. Maybe back then most of them only focuses on cognition side (a person’s ability and processing power) but lacks on emotion side (frustration, stress, etc). Her field of study claims to balance the cognition and emotion on developing technologies.

Even before she started the research group she already suggested that computers need the skills of emotional intelligence for interaction with us “people”. She started by enabling computers to be able to interact with human emotions. Her product can be in form of wearable sensors, audio and video coupled with signal processing, etc. These products are design to be able to sense the physical and the emotional condition of the user. Then they will respond these values, whether to the health condition, stress level, or frustration of the users to ease them, in other words user friendly.

This field needs a collaboration between other fields (lots of them) because it includes many different aspect. The starting is in the psychology of human emotions, one of the oldest research field, that we need to understand human emotions. Up to now, not yet I have heard that a device exist that could straightly identifies the emotion of someone, but instead uses the physical phenomena that is generated by the person, for example the body…