How to design appropriate and effective affective interventions?

Let me introduce you to an affective intervention design process (AFFINT) that combines analysis of the designed application with knowledge of affective phenomena and affective tools in order to formulate an affective intervention model for an application. The proposed AFFINT process facilitates the designing of an affective intervention model for every intelligent system.

Shall systems react to human emotions?

Affective states influence the way people work or act and although computers are considered as purely logical, human–computer interaction (HCI) is significantly influenced by emotions.
Modern intelligent systems are designed to support human activities. The systems often adapt control flow and functionality to the user’s cognitive receptiveness. New methods and techniques of affective computing has allowed intelligent systems to adapt also to users’ emotional states in order to support user effectiveness.

Is there a challenge in designing an affect-aware application?

Let us consider an example of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that supports the effective learning process. Some emotions, e.g. boredom, frustration and more, are known to disturb learning and an ITS may recognize and address these undesired emotional states in order to keep a user on the desired educational path.
In other words, affect-aware systems could make an intervention when certain objectives (e.g. task effectiveness) are not met; however, the system should refrain from making interventions if it could disturb the user in his/her execution of appropriate tasks.

 

 

An introduction to the AFFINT process is provided here:

Download AFFINT description

AFFINT process enables design of valuable and natural affective interventions.

AFFINT process is used is game design and e-learning systems design.

AFFINT process is supported with scientific research.*

 

 

You are free to use AFFINT process in your commercial and non-commercial projects.

CC-BY licence applies. While using the process or this introduction please refer to:

*Landowska A, Szwoch M, Szwoch W, Methodology of Affective Intervention Design for Intelligent Systems, Interacting with Computers, Oxford Journals, 2016, doi: 10.1093/iwc/iwv047