An Emotion-Aware Persuasive Architecture to Support Challenging Classroom Situations

Nowadays, students face stressful situations that affect their mental health and negatively impact their academic performance. This situation has been exacerbated due to the COVID-19 pandemics. Teaching and learning process stakeholders face two main problems: the lack of awareness of the situations arising from students and the little available information that support the teaching activities. Here, we propose an emotion-aware architecture for persuasive systems in education, identifying challenging classroom situations and promoting mental health through multi-modal persuasive notifications. An important module is emotion inference, which reads real-time physiological data from students through the Empatica E4 wristband. Based on this architecture, we developed the Kusisqa persuasive system, to support students in regulating their negative emotions (They can all lead to stress) during challenging classroom situations. Preliminary results provide insights that teachers achieved an increased awareness of the situations of students and perceived the prototype tool as useful.