The affect-aware city

Abstract

The goal of smart cities can be summarized as optimizing the city's services (transportation, utilities, safety and many others) in order to improve the quality of life of its residents. A means to this goal is the heavy use of information and communications technology to give the city awareness of the real world and enable intelligent decision making. At the same time, the field of Affective Computing aims to give machines the ability to interpret and utilize human emotions. It is argued that emotions are an inseparable aspect of human intelligence. We thus propose our vision of the affect-aware city. By being capable of understanding the affective states of its citizens, the city's decision making processes can be brought in line with what truly matters to the people. We give an overview of the relevant affective states. We show how they can be detected individually and then aggregated into a global model of affect. The paper concludes with some inspiring applications that are possible in an affective city.