Multimodal Affective Computing to Enhance the User Experience of Educational Software Applications

Abstract

Affective computing is becoming more and more important as it enables to extend the possibilities of computing technologies by incorporating emotions. In fact, the detection of users’ emotions has become one of the most important aspects regarding Affective Computing. In this paper, we present an educational software application that incorporates affective computing by detecting the users’ emotional states to adapt its behaviour to the emotions sensed. This way, we aim at increasing users’ engagement to keep them motivated for longer periods of time, thus improving their learning progress. To prove this, the application has been assessed with real users. The performance of a set of users using the proposed system has been compared with a control group that used the same system without implementing emotion detection. The outcomes of this evaluation have shown that our proposed system, incorporating affective computing, produced better results than the one used by the control group.

This research work has been partially funded by the regional project of JCCM with reference SBPLY/17/180501/000495, by the Scholarship Program granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, and the predoctoral fellowship with reference 2017-BCL-6528, granted by the University of Castilla-La Mancha.