Limitations and Challenges

Although with the different theories of emotions, physiological responses are widely accepted as a way to reflect emotions. However, recognizing emotions through physiological responses can be difficult. While in a controlled environment, emotions can be acted out and even if the physiological responses might not be completely accurate, the start time of the emotions is known. The start time is particularly important as it allows the data to be separated to compare with the emotions. On the other hand, in a natural environment, the start time could be hard to detect due to the subject’s being unaware when the emotion they are feeling actually start. The exact start time is often not reliable making it hard to separate the data.

This is a diagram to show generally how a computer interact with the user through affective computing.

Figure 1 From Armando Barreto (2008). Non-intrusive Physiological Monitoring for Affective Sensing of Computer Users, Human Computer Interaction: New Developments, Kikuo Asai (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-7619-14-5, InTech

We also have to correctly map the data to different emotions where many emotions share certain physiological signs. Physiological signals can also be affected by non-emotional changes such as coughing or sneezing which can disrupt the subject’s physiological signals. Our individual physiological responses are also not identical and they can respond differently to emotions. There is currently no known method to separate the emotional and non-emotional responses.