Designing an ontology for emotion-driven visual representations

Emotions influence our perceptions and decisions and are often felt more strongly in situations related to healthcare. Therefore, it is important to understand how both providers and patients express their emotions in face-to-face scenarios. An ontology is a way to represent domain concepts and the relationships between them in a polyarchical manner. We have created an ontological model called the Visualized Emotion Ontology (VEO) that expresses the semantic definitions and visualizations of 25 emotions based on published research. With VEO, we can augment patient-facing software tools, like embodied conversational agents, to improve patient-provider interaction in clinical environments.