Wearable Tools for Affective Remote Collaboration

Abstract

Affective computing is the study and development of systems that can recognize human emotions and feelings. Emotions are always an interesting topic of research and these days researchers are trying to develop systems which can recognize, interpret and process emotions based on human physiological and neural changes for the development of well-being. As the market for wearable devices is expanding, it provides more opportunity of research in emotion sharing with remote person. This Master’s thesis investigates the possibility of using wearable devices for affective remote collaboration. Previous research about affective computing, affective communication and remote collaboration using wearable devices is reviewed before starting the design process. Three wearable devices were developed, evaluated and discussed, two for emotion sharing between remote people, and the third for preliminary research to explore if eye gaze information can increase co-presence in remote collaboration. Conclusions and Future work are discussed based on the results from the research evaluation.