Adding Emotional Intelligence to Physical Spaces: Data-Driven Solutions for Measuring, Analysing, and Responding to User Needs and Expectations

Although emotions can influence our living, experiences, and performance in different contexts, current immersive services in physical environments are failing to read, interpret and respond to our emotions. This study aims to provide understanding of how to enhance physical spaces with emotionally aware, intelligent, and integrated services meeting the expectations of the users. It focuses on three different environments (office, public space and transport) and defines the high-level requirements for the technologies needed for the implementation of emotionally intelligent services, as well as identifies the stakeholders involved in service creation and data processing. Service concepts were generated in collaboration with experts from academia and industry using co-creation methods. The industrial partners of this study see that the novel sensing capabilities and artificial emotional intelligence-based solutions for behaviour analysis and situational awareness have the potential to enable new services, for both the space operators and the users. For such services, the pipeline from data to information and actions must be streamlined and modular, which requires research on technologies, analytics methods, service, and business model design. Ultimately, such services will enable businesses to provide experiences that understand and respond to human behaviour and emotional responses in everyday life, while interacting with technology.