The design, implementation and evaluation of a relaxation service with facial emotion detection

Even though current research includes many proposals for systems that provide assistance and services to people in healthcare fields, such systems generally emphasize the support of physical rather than emotional aspects. Emotional health is as important as physical health. Negative emotional health can lead to social or mental health problems. To cope with negative emotional health, we proposed a healthcare system that focuses on emotional aspects by integrating emotion detection from facial expressions to recognize the current emotional states of users. When they are experiencing negative emotions, our system suggests that they take a break and provides appropriate services (including relaxation, amusement and excitement services) with augmented reality and Kinect to improve their emotional state. This paper presents a prototype of a relaxation service with real-time facial emotion detection, describes its design and implementation, and experimentally evaluates user feelings while they experience our relaxation service with real-time facial emotion detection.