AIWAC: affective interaction through wearable computing and cloud technology

Abstract

To reduce the heavy burden from rapidly growing demands of healthcare service, wearable computing-assisted healthcare has been proposed for health monitoring and remote medical care. Although the provisioning of healthcare services can be significantly enhanced via wearable-enabled technologies, great challenges arise due to the lack of a human-centric mechanism for affective interaction. In this article, we propose a novel architecture, Affective Interaction through Wearable Computing and Cloud Technology (AIWAC), which includes three components: collaborative data collection via wearable devices, enhanced sentiment analysis and forecasting models, and controllable affective interactions. Based on the proposed architecture, we present our AIWAC testbed, design a practical mechanism for wearable computing-based emotional interaction, and discuss its open problems, which inspire potential research as a new direction.