SCOUT and affective interaction design: Evaluating physiological signals for usability in emotional processing

The issue of study in emotion or affect has been recently examined by Human-computer Interaction (HCI) research groups, in particular for the development of affective interaction and design. With the recent technological advances, humans are able to interact with computers in ways which are almost impossible. The new modalities for computer interaction with human emotion such skin conductivity, heart rate, brain signals and physiological signals are emerging, which extend beyond the confines of the keyboard and mouse. As such, emotion plays an important role in human-to-human communication and interaction, which allows people to express it beyond the verbal domain. The physiological signals, which are the focus of this study, play a significant method for usability study in HCI. Numbers of usability psychometrics are developed, however, a few yield “natural” interpretations, such as feelings. The physiological signals can be interpreted as a trustworthy of emotional reveal. In this study, we conduct an affective interaction and design development for an e-Learning storyboard tool called SCOUT. The paper describes the significant role of physiological signals as a method to study usability in emotion in the area of HCI and Affective Computing. Affective design and interaction are also discussed in the SCOUT development. The comparison of different research areas in HCI, focusing on different key attributes and physiological signals are studied. The result of the analysis revealed that physiological signal should be used as important as other usability psychometric in HCI, to enrich the evaluation of human-computer interaction study with human emotion.