This paper considers how the use of physiological sensing to measure human emotions will change the world in areas such as education, human-robot interfaces, job applications, interaction with friends, finding love and ultimately, how to live. For example, a particularly interesting question relates to people’s emotions in relation to delivering a “good” job performance, through introducing automated systems which seek to balance the tasks to be undertaken by machines versus those managed by people, thereby improving overall performance. In such cases, we would need to consider if the emotional behaviour that people display have important keys to building more successful and productive systems and whether removing emotions be counterproductive. Also, we consider whether grounding human-computer interfaces in the rich and complex emotional lives of people can lead to more effective and productive systems? This paper will examine such issues through the use of a scenario centred design approach called science fiction prototyping, aiming to cast a little more light on the design of such emotion based systems.

Peer Reviewed