AffectiChat (Affective Computing Research) : An Emotional Texting App

AffectiChat was part of my human computer interaction research in emotional computing and emotional recognition in everyday interaction with daily tasks at the University of Bamberg HCI group. You can also check my publication An Explorative Study on Requirements for Ambient Displays Presenting Mood Awareness for detecting and presenting mood in team configuration to create an empathetic environment within groups.

AffectiChat is a concept and an implementation for an emotional live-stream presentation of non-verbal facial emotional valance during mobile instant messaging. The system provides a feedback for communicating partners in a continuous non-interruptive form shown separately from the texting session, and storing the history of the emotional feedback of the conversation by attaching it to the communicated text. We ought to explore live streaming of non-verbal emotional awareness in mobile CMC environment.

A prototype was built based on XMPP protocol with an extendable API to allow for different presentations of emotional feedback and a within-subject study design for gathering users feedback in 3 different conditions: (1) with emotional live-stream (2) without emotional live-stream but emotion awareness attached in text, and (3) with no emotional awareness.

We used interviews and a scientifically validated questionnaire to probe user experience after their interaction with our emotional detecting text chat and normal chatting. Our research results showed distinct and interesting patterns.