Extending a Collaborative Architecture to Support Emotional Awareness

Emotions play an important role in human interaction. Both, our own emotional state and our perception of that of others with which we collaborate influence the outcome of cooperative work. With the growing interest in providing computational support for the recognition and representation of emotions, there is a clear interest in adding such facilities to Groupware systems and to evaluate the positive and negative effects of using this additional channel of communication. In this paper, we present an extension to a collaborative pattern system and development framework, named COCHI, to support emotional awareness. With this extension, developers can implement collaborative systems that sense physiological signals from the user, map them to a model of emotions, and display them as part of the shared interface. Furthermore, this extension facilitates the development of experimental systems that can be used to propose and test different models of emotions and interface widgets for representing them. We also present two emotion-based collaborative systems built using COCHI and preliminary tests conducted with them.