10th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Research Article

A study of elderly people's emotional understanding of prompts given by Virtual Humans

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.16-5-2016.2263327,
        author={Aarti Malhotra and Jesse Hoey and Alexandra K\o{}nig and Sarel Vuuren},
        title={A study of elderly people's emotional understanding of prompts given by Virtual Humans},
        proceedings={10th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH},
        year={2016},
        month={6},
        keywords={virtual human alzheimer dementia affective computing},
        doi={10.4108/eai.16-5-2016.2263327}
    }
    
  • Aarti Malhotra
    Jesse Hoey
    Alexandra König
    Sarel Vuuren
    Year: 2016
    A study of elderly people's emotional understanding of prompts given by Virtual Humans
    PERVASIVEHEALTH
    EAI
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.16-5-2016.2263327
Aarti Malhotra1,*, Jesse Hoey1, Alexandra König1, Sarel Vuuren2
  • 1: University of Waterloo
  • 2: University of Colorado
*Contact email: aarti9@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper presents a study conducted to understand how facial expressions in audio-visual prompts given by virtual humans are understood by elderly people on an emotional level with an aim to design emotionally aligned prompts for persons with cognitive disabilities who often need assistance from a caregiver to complete daily living activities such as washing hands, making food, or getting dressed. Artificially intelligent systems have been developed that can assist in such situations. Our long term aim is to enhance such systems by delivering automated prompts that are emotionally aligned with individuals in order to have better human-system interaction in helping with the tasks. This paper presents a set of prompts of male and female virtual humans with a focus on their facial expressions. A user study with elderly persons was conducted with respect to three basic and important dimensions of emotional experience: Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (EPA). Results show that there is significant consensus on E and P dimensions, and some consensus on the A dimension.