Affectively intelligent and adaptive car interfaces

In this article, we describe a new approach to enhance driving safety via multi-media technologies by recognizing and adapting to drivers’ emotions with multi-modal intelligent car interfaces. The primary objective of this research was to build an affectively intelligent and adaptive car interface that could facilitate a natural communication with its user (i.e., the driver). This objective was achieved by recognizing drivers’ affective states (i.e., emotions experienced by the drivers) and by responding to those emotions by adapting to the current situation via an affective user model created for each individual driver. A controlled experiment was designed and conducted in a virtual reality environment to collect physiological data signals (galvanic skin response, heart rate, and temperature) from participants who experienced driving-related emotions and states (neutrality, panic/fear, frustration/anger, and boredom/sleepiness). k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Marquardt-Backpropagation (MBP), and Resilient Backpropagation (RBP) Algorithms were implemented to analyze the collected data signals and to find unique physiological patterns of emotions. RBP was the best classifier of these three emotions with 82.6% accuracy, followed by MBP with 73.26% and by KNN with 65.33%. Adaptation of the interface was designed to provide multi-modal feedback to the users about their current affective state and to respond to users’ negative emotional states in order to decrease the possible negative impacts of those emotions. Bayesian Belief Networks formalization was employed to develop the user model to enable the intelligent system to appropriately adapt to the current context and situation by considering user-dependent factors, such as personality traits and preferences.