Section: New Software and Platforms

EmoPRAMAD

Participant : Dominique Vaufreydaz [correspondant] .

Affective computing,

Within the Pramad project, we want to offer a full affective loop between the companion robot and the elderly people at home. This affective loop is necessary within the context of everyday interaction of elderly and the companion robot. A part of this loop is to make the robot express emotions in response to the emotional state of the user. To do that, we need to test our working hypothesis about the visual representation of emotions with the 3D face of robot. EmoPRAMAD is an evaluation tool designed to conduct comparative studies between human faces and the 3D faces expressing a defined set of emotions.

Figure 3. EmoPRAMAD interfaces with a human face and a 3D face from our virtual agent.

The evaluation conducted though EmoPRAMAD concerns both unimodal (facial only) and bimodal conditions (facial/sound). The emotions set is composed of 4 basic emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness) and a neutral state. While experimenting, the software collects several parameters in order to evaluate more than correctness of the answers: time to respond, length of mouse moves, etc. Experimentation is still in progress at Inria in Grenoble, University Pierre and Marie Currie and Broca Hospital in Paris. A set of 235 participants from 14 to 88 years old was already recorded.