EmIoT: Giving Emotional Intelligence to the Internet of Things

Abstract

In the last decade, we have been experiencing an increasing level of intelligence that the objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) have been augmented with, especially in the direction of giving them cognitive and socialization capabilities. We believe that this evolution should go further in the direction of the Emotional Intelligence, which allows humans to be successful in their lives. EmIoT is the resulting paradigm that we propose, which is aimed to increase the Quality of Experience delivered by IoT applications by making IoT capable of: understanding peoples needs by observing them; better management of its own resources on the basis of users emotional state; creating a level of affection to be used for leveraging the level of interaction between IoT and users. The paper's contribution lies in the definition of the paradigm, the analysis of the new functionalities the IoT should be augmented with, and the preliminary investigation of the possible EmIoT architecture.