On line - Affective state reporting device: A tool for evaluating affective state inference systems

The monitoring of human affective state is a key part of developing responsive and naturally behaving human-robot interaction systems. However, evaluation and calibration of physiologically monitored affective state data is typically done using offline questionnaires and user reports. In this paper we investigate the use of an online-device for collecting real-time user reports of affective state during interaction with a robot. These reports are compared to both previous survey reports taken after the interaction, and the affective states estimated by an inference system. The aim is to evaluate and characterize the physiological signal-based inference system and determine which factors significantly influence its performance. This analysis will be used in future work, to fine tune the affective estimations by identifying what kind of variations in physiological signals precede or accompany the variations in reported affective states.