Signal processing for recognition of human frustration

Abstract

In this work, inspired by the application of human-machine interaction and the potential use that human-computer interfaces can make of knowledge regarding the affective state of a user, we investigate the problem of sensing and recognizing typical affective experiences that arise when people communicate with computers. In particular, we address the problem of detecting "frustration" in human computer interfaces. By first sensing human biophysiological correlates of internal affective states, we proceed to stochastically model the biological time series with hidden Markov models to obtain user-dependent recognition systems that learn affective patterns from a set of training data. Labeling criteria to classify the data are discussed, and generalization of the results to a set of unobserved data is evaluated. Significant recognition results (greater than random) are reported for 21 of 24 subjects.