Affective Interaction & Sensitive Classroom

Affective computing, sometimes known as emotional computing, is one of the most recent and hottest research area in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Researchers are trying to incorporate affect and emotion in HCI to make the interaction “sympathetic”, “empathic” or simply “affective”. The obvious ambition is to improve usability and user experience by making the systems more natural and responsive to the goals and expectations of the user. The first and foremost step for designing an affective interactive system is to recognize the affective state of the user. This may be followed by the design and implementation of appropriate interface and interaction that complement and/or change the users’ affective/emotional state. We, the affective computing team of UCCN Lab of IITG are working both on identifying affective state of the users as well as designing affective interactive systems. For identifying affective state of the user, we mainly emphasize to consider the users of small handheld and touchscreen devices including mobile phones and tablets, as explosion of these devices are clearly observable all around us. At the same time, we are developing a sensitive classroom system where the emotional states of the students will be taken care of to make the teaching-learning process more efficient. Based on the emotional and mental states of the students, teaching learning strategies will dynamically be changed to enhance the students’ interest and engagement and hence, the quality of learning. In our ICT based sensitive classroom system, the students will be warned if they were not engaged in the classroom during lecture. They will also be motivated for engagement through some smart module of the system. The instructor will also be alerted if maximum of the students are not engaged or unable to understand what the teacher is teaching, so that s/he can take corrective actions (if required). The learning level and understanding level of the students will also be periodically measured. All these will be done automatically and systematically by the classroom system itself. Once completed, the sensitive classroom will help to enhance the teaching learning method by a strikingly large extent.