Real-time integration of emotion analysis into homecare platforms.

The scientific and technological advancements in the area of affective computing enable the development of services in various domains that facilitate the interaction between humans and computers, and can considerably improve decision-making. This work presents the integration and operation of an emotion analysis service in a homecare/mHealth application. In the described approach, the developed emotion analysis service follows the IoT paradigm and it is combined with features for connectivity such as biosignal sensors and wearables, while it is fully integrated in the WebRTC video communication functionality offered by the homecare platform. Thus, it supports the medical experts to perform real-time analysis of their patients' emotional status during interactive video-conference sessions. The paper discusses the technical details of the implementation and the integration of the proposed service and provides initial results from its operation in practice.