1st International Workshop on Affective Computing and Health Care: new research and industrial perspectives

Emotions are part of the human’s health, both physical and mental. Therefore, affective computing plays a role in health care. 

Affective computing is a constantly expanding field that aims to explore how technology can detect, classify and assess and utilize emotions to enhance the wellbeing of individuals. As a branch of artificial intelligence, affective computing drives new research ideas in knowledge extraction and representation, pattern recognition, machine learning and deep learning in the health care area. Accordingly, different types of data need to be processed by the existing algorithms, such as images, audios, videos, texts, physiological signals, etc. At the same time, affective computing brings with it some open questions, such as gathering emotion data in a practical and trustworthy manner, extracting robust features for emotion representation, creating the learning model and designing the real-time system.

The application and the development of methods based on affective computing in the health care area is of fundamental importance for prognostic, diagnostic, and therapeutic purposes, especially in cognitive and neurodegenerative diseases, like depression, schizophrenia, or dementia. 

Ubiquitous and continue monitoring of affective state is possible by means of non-invasive wearable devices, thus opening the way to innovative diagnostic paradigms, also suitable for telemedicine. At the same time, there is a growing demand for such technologies, methods and applications, with an increasing role for industrial research in the field.

The aim of the workshop is therefore to present and discuss the recent advances in the field of affective computing used in the health care area, given the huge impact and open questions of the thematic in the medical field. We are inviting original research work, as well as significant work-in-progress, covering novel theories, innovative methods, and meaningful applications that can potentially lead to significant advances in the affective health care field.

This workshop is an opportunity to bring together academic and industrial scientists to discuss the recent advances in the field of affective health care. Accepted research works will be presented and discussed. The workshop will host an industrial mini track, where invited industrial partners will show the practical development of new research ideas in the field.

 The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Artificial intelligence algorithms in affective computing

• Affective communication

• Computer vision systems for affective computing

• Speech recognition and natural language processing

• Facial expression recognition

• Body gesture analysis

• Sentiment analysis

• Affective odour perception and impact of odours in human wellbeing

• Physiological signals processing (heart rate variability, respiration, electro-dermal activity, etc.)

• Wearable solutions for affective computing and health care

• Mobile solutions for affective computing

• Affective computing in telemedicine

• Human-robot interaction

Selected articles will be invited to submit an extended version to be published after the review process in a special journal issue.

All workshop accepted papers and posters will appear in the IEEE Conference Proceedings (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/1001586/all-proceedings)

Dr. Daniela Cardone

Department of Engineering and Geology, University "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara, Italy

E-mail: d.cardone@unich.it

Phone: +39 085 453 7260