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 wearableenabled 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.