Hospital environments are facing new challenges this century. One of the most important is the quality of services to patients. Social robots are gaining prominence due to the advantages they offer; in particular, several of their main uses have proven beneficial during the pandemic. This study aims to shed light on the current status of the design of social robots and their interaction with patients. To this end, a systematic review was conducted using WoS and MEDLINE, and the results were exhaustive analyzed. The authors found that most of the initiatives and projects serve the elderly and children, and specifically, that they helped these groups fight diseases such as dementia, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), cancer, and diabetes.

Emotions-aware applications are getting a lot of attention as a way to improve the user experience, and also thanks to increasingly affordable Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCI). Thus, projects collecting emotion-related data are proliferating, like social networks sentiment analysis or tracking students’ engagement to reduce Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) drop out rates. All them require a common way to represent emotions so it can be more easily integrated, shared and reused by applications improving user experience. Due to the complexity of this data, our proposal is to use rich semantic models based on ontology. EmotionsOnto is a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology has been applied in the context of EmoCS, a project that collaboratively collects emotion common sense and models it using the EmotionsOnto and other ontologies. Currently, emotion input is provided manually by users. However, experiments are being conduced to automatically measure users’s emotional states using Brain–Computer Interfaces

Technical advances, particularly the integration of wearable and embedded sensors, facilitate tracking of physiological responses in a less intrusive way. Currently, there are many devices that allow gathering biometric measurements from human beings, such as EEG Headsets or Health Bracelets. The massive data sets generated by tracking of EEG and physiology may be used, among other things, to infer knowledge about human moods and emotions. Apart from direct biometric signal measurement, eye tracking systems are nowadays capable of determining the point of gaze of the users when interacting in ICT environments, which provides an added value research on many different areas, such as psychology or marketing. We present a process in which devices for eye tracking, biometric and EEG signal measurements are synchronously used for studying both basic and complex emotions. We selected the least intrusive devices for different signal data collection given the study requirements and cost constraints, so users would behave in the most natural way possible. On the one hand, we have been able to determine basic emotions participants were experiencing by means of valence and arousal. On the other hand, a complex emotion such as empathy has also been detected. To validate the usefulness of this approach, a study involving 44 people has been carried out, where they were exposed to a series of affective stimuli while their EEG activity, biometric signals and eye position were synchronously recorded to detect self-regulation. The hypothesis of the work was that people who self regulated would show significantly different results when analyzing their EEG data. Participants were divided into two groups depending on whether Electro Dermal Activity (EDA) data indicated they self-regulated or not. The comparison of the results obtained using different machine learning algorithms for emotion recognition shows that using EEG activity alone as a predictor for self-regulation does not allow properly determining whether a person in self-regulation its emotions while watching affective stimuli. However, adequately combining different data sources in a synchronous way to detect emotions makes it possible to overcome the limitations of single detection methods.

Research on affective communication for socially assistive robots has been conducted to enable physical robots to perceive, express, and respond emotionally. However, the use of affective computing in social robots has been limited, especially when social robots are designed for children, and especially those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Social robots are based on cognitive-affective models, which allow them to communicate with people following social behaviors and rules. However, interactions between a child and a robot may change or be different compared to those with an adult or when the child has an emotional deficit. In this study, we systematically reviewed studies related to computational models of emotions for children with ASD. We used the Scopus, WoS, Springer, and IEEE-Xplore databases to answer different research questions related to the definition, interaction, and design of computational models supported by theoretical psychology approaches from 1997 to 2021. Our review found 46 articles; not all the studies considered children or those with ASD.

The study of emotion in human beings has traditionally been a research interest area in disciplines such as psychology and sociology. The appearance of affective computing paradigm has made it possible to include findings from these disciplines in the development of affective interfaces. Still, there is a lack of applications that take emotion related aspects into account. This situation is mainly due to the great amount of proposed theoretical models and the complexity of human emotions. Besides, the importance that mobile computing area is acquiring has made necessary to bear context related aspects in mind. The proposal presented in this paper is based on a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology is proposed as a way to develop a formal model that can be easily computerized. Moreover, it is based on a standard, the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which also makes ontologies easily shareable and extensible. Once formalized as an ontology, the knowledge about emotions is used in order to make computers more accessible, personalised and adapted to user needs.

This study conducts research on deepfakes technology evolution and trends based on a bibliometric analysis of the articles published on this topic along with six research questions: What are the main research areas of the articles in deepfakes? What are the main current topics in deepfakes research and how are they related? Which are the trends in deepfakes research? How do topics in deepfakes research change over time? Who is researching deepfakes? Who is funding deepfakes research? We have found a total of 331 research articles about deepfakes in an analysis carried out on the Web of Science and Scopus databases. This data serves to provide a complete overview of deepfakes. Main insights include: different areas in which deepfakes research is being performed; which areas are the emerging ones, those that are considered basic, and those that currently have the most potential for development; most studied topics on deepfakes research, including the different artificial intelligence methods applied; emerging and niche topics; relationships among the most prominent researchers; the countries where deepfakes research is performed; main funding institutions. This paper identifies the current trends and opportunities in deepfakes research for practitioners and researchers who want to get into this topic.