The increasingly ageing population and the tendency to live alone have led science and engineering researchers to search for health care solutions. In the COVID 19 pandemic, the elderly have been seriously affected in addition to suffering from isolation and its associated and psychological consequences. This paper provides an overview of the RobWell (Robotic-based Well-Being Monitoring and Coaching System for the Elderly in their Daily Activities) system. It is a system focused on the field of artificial intelligence for mood prediction and coaching. This paper presents a general overview of the initially proposed system as well as the preliminary results related to the home automation subsystem, autonomous robot navigation and mood estimation through machine learning prior to the final system integration, which will be discussed in future works. The main goal is to improve their mental well-being during their daily household activities. The system is composed of ambient intelligence with intelligent sensors, actuators and a robotic platform that interacts with the user. A test smart home system was set up in which the sensors, actuators and robotic platform were integrated and tested. For artificial intelligence applied to mood prediction, we used machine learning to classify several physiological signals into different moods. In robotics, it was concluded that the ROS autonomous navigation stack and its autodocking algorithm were not reliable enough for this task, while the robot’s autonomy was sufficient. Semantic navigation, artificial intelligence and computer vision alternatives are being sought.

We present a system designed to monitor the well-being of older adults during their daily activities. To automatically detect and classify their emotional state, we collect physiological data through a wearable medical sensor. Ground truth data are obtained using a simple smartphone app that provides ecological momentary assessment (EMA), a method for repeatedly sampling people’s current experiences in real time in their natural environments. We are making the resulting dataset publicly available as a benchmark for future comparisons and methods. We are evaluating two feature selection methods to improve classification performance and proposing a feature set that augments and contrasts domain expert knowledge based on time-analysis features. The results demonstrate an improvement in classification accuracy when using the proposed feature selection methods. Furthermore, the feature set we present is better suited for predicting emotional states in a leave-one-day-out experimental setup, as it identifies more patterns.

This paper examines the significance of the priming effect in designing and developing models for recognizing of affective states. Using a public dataset, often considered a benchmark in automatic stress recognition, the significance of the priming effect is explicated. Two experimental setups confirm the importance of task ordering in this problem. The results demonstrate the statistical significance of the model’s confusion when the subject has previously experienced stress and illustrate the importance for the Affective Computing community to develop methods to mitigate the priming effect where the order of tasks impacts how data should be modelled.

Affective priming exemplifies the challenge of ambiguity in affective computing. While the community has largely addressed this issue from a label-based perspective, identifying data points in the sequence affected by the priming effect, the impact of priming on data itself, particularly in physiological signals, remains underexplored. Data affected by priming can lead to misclassifications when used in learning models. This study proposes the Affective Priming Score (APS), a data-driven method to detect data points influenced by the priming effect. The APS assigns a score to each data point, quantifying the extent to which it is affected by priming. To validate this method, we apply it to the SEED and SEED-VII datasets, which contain sufficient transitions between emotional events to exhibit priming effects. We train models with the same configuration using both the original data and priming-free sequences. The misclassification rate is significantly reduced when using priming-free sequences compared to the original data. This work contributes to the broader challenge of ambiguity by identifying and mitigating priming effects at the data level, enhancing model robustness, and offering valuable insights for the design and collection of affective computing datasets.