Detecting Emotions and Dangerous Actions for Better Human-System Team Working

As situations change very often and extensively today, design is moving toward user-centric because designers cannot foresee the operating conditions and it is a user who knows the situations. Thus, what is called for in a system is to help a user understand the situation better and to help him or her to respond better. Thus, human characteristics must be considered more in a system design. But recent brain studies reveal that in an unexpected situation, humanpsilas brain capability decreases considerably, down to the level of about 30% of the normal state because a human becomes emotionally unstable. Therefore, it will be very important in our future system design to keep a user emotionally stable. We carried out a series of experiments and developed several methods to detect emotions from face, from voice and from body motion and to detect dangerous actions from body motion. Our immediate goal is to apply these techniques to realize safer driving.