Towards Emotionally Sensitive Conversational Interfaces for E-therapy

In this paper, we enhance systems interacting in healthcare domains by means of incorporating emotionally sensitive spoken conversational interfaces. The emotion recognizer is integrated in these systems as an intermediate phase between natural language understanding and dialog management in the architecture of a spoken dialog system. The prediction of the user's emotional state, carried out for each user turn in the dialog, makes it possible to adapt the system dynamically selecting the next system response taking into account this valuable information. We have applied our proposal to develop an emotionally sensitive conversational system adapted to patients suffering from chronic pulmonary diseases, and provide a discussion of the positive influence of our proposal in the perceived quality.