Emotional Keyboard: To Provide Adaptive Functionalities Based on the Current User Emotion and the Context

Abstract

Improving the User Experience (UX) of mobile devices is of vital importance due to the advent of emerging technologies and the prevalence of using mobile devices. This research aims to develop a model for a mobile device that can suggest adaptive functionalities, based on the current user emotion and the context by changing the user’s negative emotions (sadness and anger) into positive ones. As a proof of concept, a keyboard named “Emotional Keyboard” was developed through five prototypes iteratively using Evolutionary Prototyping. Action Research was adopted as the methodology along with User-Centered Design (UCD) which further included two user surveys. The first three prototypes were implemented to decide the most optimal perception from facial expressions and text analytics. Subsequent prototypes provided affective functions to the user such as listening to music, playing a game, chat with friends, based on the detected negative emotion and the context. The evaluation of each of the prototypes was performed iteratively with user participation. The final (fifth) prototype evaluation was done in two phases, an individual analysis (to measure the performance of each user separately), and an overall analysis (a general analysis that averaged all the results from individual analysis and measured the performance of the overall model). Results of both analyses showed that eventually the Emotional Keyboard was able to predict the adaptive functions correctly to the user and it did not terminate its learning process where the users’ feedback was continuously used to improve its performance. In conclusion, an “Adaptive System with User Control” was developed thus improving the acceptability and usability of a mobile device which aligns with the research aim.