Emotions in Pervasive Computing Environments

The ability of an intelligent environment to connect and adapt to real internal sates, needs and behaviors' meaning of humans can be made possible by considering users' emotional states as contextual parameters. In this paper, the authors build on enactive psychology and investigate the incorporation of emotions in pervasive systems. They define emotions, and discuss the coding of emotional human markers by smart environments. In addition, they compare some existing works and identify how emotions can be detected and modeled by a pervasive system in order to enhance its service and response to users. Finally, they analyze closely one XML-based language for representing and annotating emotions known as EARL and raise two important issues which pertain to emotion representation and modeling in XML-based languages.