Hybrid affective computing--keyboard, mouse and touch screen: from review to experiment

Emotions play an important role in human interactions. They can be integrated into the computer system to make human---computer interaction (HCI) more effective. Affective computing is an innovative computational modeling and detecting user's emotions to optimize system responses in HCI. However, there is a trade-off between recognition accuracy and real-time performance in some of the methods such as processing the facial expressions, human voice and body gestures. Other methods lack efficiency and usability in real-world applications such as natural language processing and electroencephalography signals. To accomplish a reliable, usable and high-performance system, this paper proposes an intelligent hybrid approach to recognize users' emotions by using easily accessible and low computational cost input devices including keyboard, mouse (touch pad: single touch) and touch screen display (single touch). Using the proposed approach, the system is developed and trained in a supervised mode by artificial neural network and support vector machine (SVM) techniques. The result shows an increase in accuracy of 6 % (93.20 %) by SVM in comparison with the currently existing methods. It is a significant contribution to show new directions of future research in emotion recognition, user modeling and emotional intelligence.