Agent-Based System for Affective Intelligent Environment

Within the Ambient Intelligence research field there is little attention payed to the affective side of the users. However, we believe that it should not be ignored, because emotions have an important role in all human cognitive processes and in their behavior. A smart environment should be able to detect the emotional state of the persons living there and to adjust its answers according to the user affective needs. With this objective in mind, we address the idea of building a smart museum. Consequently, we have built an agent-based system that aims to respond to the affective component of the visitors of this museum, by guiding them to the gallery that would induce them a pleasant affective state. In this paper we introduce the agent-based system built, but we focus on the first step that must be done in the system life cycle: detect visitor affective state. We do this by reading their facial expressions, using the Kinect Face Tracking SDK.