An intelligent framework for emotion aware e-healthcare support systems

Abstract

There is a prominent connection between human health and human emotion. This connection has encouraged researchers to produce numerous applications in order to facilitate patients and therapists. In this paper, through a review study we highlight how the development of intelligent emotion aware e-health systems can facilitate patient's satisfaction, emotion wellbeing, and physical health, and improve the quality of service offered by health care related businesses. Moreover, we discuss the challenges and difficulties concerning emotion recognition and modelling systems responsible for representing the patient's affective state in real life health care environments. In our research, we aim to address these challenges by proposing a novel framework for developing emotion aware health care support systems. The suggested methodology enables a holistic and reflective representation of the patient's affective state, and incorporates a number of design choices that are suitable for emotion modelling and recognition in the context of a real life health care environment. This methodology leads to the development of a unique emotion aware health care support system, which utilizes Fuzzy Logic to recognize the patient's affective state based on basic cognitive/affective cues, such as the patient's predictions and evaluations of a treatment. The system based on the calculated emotion recognition results, delivers tailored feedback to influence the patient towards a desired and beneficial affective state. As demonstrated in this paper, the proposed emotion-modelling methodology could be very useful when applied in specific real life contexts to develop novel health care systems that are able to accurately monitor and predict their user's emotions.