Empathic Technologies Shaping Innovative Interaction: Future Directions of Affective Computing

Affective computing became a prominent research area for modeling empathic Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to design interfaces that react or respond to their user’s emotions. However, several challenges remain in emotion recognition, adaptive interface intervention, real-world evaluations, or ethical implications before affective and empathic interfaces will be commonplace. In this workshop, we will discuss the current challenges of empathic and affective computing within the HCI community, including sensing, design of emotional adaptivity, and real-world evaluation. By bringing the community together, we envision ideating and creating new research directions in this field that will lead to a new generation of affective and empathic interfaces. This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in these topics through open discussions, presentations, and an interactive prototyping session.