A Study of Using SmartBox to Embed Emotion Awareness through Stimulation into E-learning Environments

Emotions strongly influence human´s behavior in individual and social situations and must be seriously considered in any human activity, such as e-Learning. Indeed, the embedding of emotional awareness features into virtual learning environments could offer a more authentic and challenging e-Learning experience, either individual or collaborative. However, the lack of empirical results together with the complexity attributed to the management by computers of human emotions and affective data, seriously limits the advances in e-Learning as it impedes to virtualize many real-world learning situations in which emotions play a significant role. In this paper, we investigate the use of the SmartBox device for emotion measurement of distance learners during their study as well as the development of affective strategies based on the SmartBox´s stimulation capabilities. The aim is to collect emotion data from different sources in order to provide the most appropriate affective responses that positively influence distance learners´ study and results and ultimately enhance the e-Learning process.