Automatic Behaviour Understanding in Medicine

Now that Affective Computing and Social Signal Processing methods are becoming increasingly robust and accurate, novel areas of applications with significant societal impact are opening up for exploration. Perhaps one of the most promising areas is the application of automatic expressive behaviour understanding to help diagnose, monitor, and treat medical conditions that themselves alter a person's social and affective signals. This work argues that this is now essentially a new area of research, called behaviomedics. It gives a definition of the area, discusses the most important groups of medical conditions that could benefit from this, and makes suggestions for future directions.